Willy Chavarria’s Cream Megaride Started an adidas Sub-Line

adidas released the cream Chavarria Megaride AG on January 30, 2026, four days after it walked the ETERNO runway in Paris, and at the time it read as a designer one-off. Eight months later that reading looks wrong. The shoe seeded an entire sub-line, and adidas has since built five more products on its name. It also went out under a colorway our own headline got wrong.

The Megaride is not new. It is an early-2000s adidas running model, revived after roughly two decades for the cushioning system it was named after. adidas describes that system in its press materials as exaggerated, which is a rare case of a brand admitting the point of a shoe is how much of it there is. The Megaride AG is the lifestyle build, and it reached retail in an unusual order. adidas showed it in June 2025 as a run of sixty samples before anyone could buy one. What adidas has never said, on its own pages or in any press release we could find, is what the AG stands for. Outlets guess at it. We are not going to, because the football meaning people reach for does not fit a shoe adidas sells through Originals on a plain rubber outsole.

Our headline called this pair white. adidas calls it cream, and the distinction is not pedantry. adidas’s own release names the two January colorways Black and Cream, and there is a separate general-release Megaride AG in actual white, style code KI6716, sitting at a different price. Writing white on this one points readers at the wrong shoe. The Chavarria build, in adidas’s own language, runs silver metal mesh across the upper under translucent TPU overlays, with reflective and suede accents at the toe and heel and the designer’s name on the tongue. The outsole is translucent putty grey broken by hits of red foam. Style code is KJ2040 for the cream and KJ2048 for the black.

One more thing adidas leaves out. Its retail copy for the Megaride AG makes no cushioning claim at all. The product page sells a textile upper, synthetic overlays and a rubber outsole, and stops there. The Megaride cushioning system appears only in the press releases, never on the page where somebody is deciding whether to spend the money. For a model named after its midsole, that is a strange omission, and it is worth knowing before anyone buys this expecting a technical shoe.

Chavarria is not a casual signing. He took the CFDA’s American Menswear Designer of the Year award in 2023 and again in 2024, back to back, and was nominated a third time in 2025. He is a New York designer out of California’s San Joaquin Valley, where he grew up in a community of immigrant farm laborers, and he spent a decade as a design director at American Eagle before the runway work. What adidas did with the Megaride afterward is the part worth noticing. This was the fourth collection of the partnership by adidas’s own count, and the Megaride is the piece that stuck. Since January the line has produced the Megaride AG XL, the Megaride Copa, the Megaride Bones and the Willy Mega Low, plus a pink AG in August. The normal arc for a designer collaboration is two drops and a quiet exit. Chavarria got handed a platform and a model name instead, and in June adidas gave him officially accredited Mexico national team product ahead of the World Cup.

Retail was $200. That put it ten dollars above the general-release Megaride AG, a narrow premium for a designer collaboration and one that reads as deliberate. His adidas footwear has stayed clustered in the same band since, from $160 for the Love Prevails Superstar in April to $220 for the AG XL and the Willy Mega Low. The January pair sold through and returned as a Complex Shop restock on February 20 at $220, a twenty-dollar markup on a shoe three weeks old. Resale has not run away with it either. It trades at roughly retail, which for a collaboration this decorated is closer to a compliment than a complaint.

The Chavarria Megaride AG in cream, style code KJ2040, released January 30, 2026 at 10 a.m. EST for $200 through the adidas CONFIRMED app, adidas.com and select retailers, alongside the black KJ2048. Neither January code resolves on adidas.com today, so the cream is a resale proposition now and the style codes are what will find it at eBay, GOAT and StockX. For anyone who would rather buy in the line than chase it, the Megaride Bones and the pink AG are both still listed.

Read next: The complete 2026 World Cup archive, every match, every goal, and the kit and boot each one was scored in.

Written by

The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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