Limited EDT has been putting local heritage on adidas shell toes for years, and in August it pointed that habit at India. The Superstar Consortium “Made in India” ran to 350 pairs across the Singapore retailer’s stores in Gurugram, Chandigarh and Singapore, with peacock and vine motifs worked across the upper and a translucent outsole. The shoe sold out. What did not happen is any word about it from adidas itself, and that absence says something about how this one came together.
The Superstar is the right canvas for a project like this because it has almost no opinions left of its own. adidas dates the design to 1969 and the public introduction to 1970, and it arrived out of Chris Severn’s push for an adidas basketball shoe to take on Converse, backed by Horst Dassler. The shell toe was the idea that turned the earlier Supergrip and Pro Model into something people recognized across a gym. Six decades later it is the most reworked silhouette adidas owns, which makes a colorway on it worth very little and a point of view on it worth a lot.
Consortium is the programme adidas uses for exactly that. In its own words on adidas India’s collaborations hub, Consortium represents the pinnacle of three-stripes creativity and culture, built through work with partners, retailers and collectives. It is still running in 2026 and still listed alongside SPZL, Wales Bonner and Y-3. When it actually started is less settled than it looks. Most accounts tie the launch to the Superstar’s 35th anniversary in 2005, Sneaker Freaker has written that it was initiated in 2007, and adidas has never published a founding year in its own voice, saying only that Consortium has existed since it first came into being.
This one is built on a Superstar Lux, adidas’ premium-leather tier, which explains a price well above a standard shell toe. A peacock runs across the shoe as a nod to India’s national bird, layered with vine patterns drawn from traditional textiles and ornamental detail lifted from centuries-old havelis. Gold finishing carries the jewellery theme through the aglets and the lace hardware, though coverage disagrees on whether that means lace locks or an “LE” dubrae, and on whether the peacock sits on the outsole or near the heel. The box is the part nobody was expecting: matchbox-inspired packaging, a custom shoe bag, motif socks, interchangeable red and blue laces alongside a standard pair in a jewellery pouch, and the numbered flame charm. That charm is where the 350 count lives. The shoes themselves are not stamped, which is a detail worth correcting wherever it has been written the other way around.
An earlier version of this post called it one of the first Consortium entries to put Indian design at its center. That claim needs narrowing. adidas Originals released the Ranveer Singh Superstar through adidas India on April 24, 2026, at the same 11,999 rupees, and adidas India itself called that shoe the first-ever co-created sneaker for the Indian market. So this is plausibly the first Consortium shoe built around Indian design, and it is nowhere near adidas’ first India-focused footwear project. The sharper read is about Limited EDT rather than adidas. The shop opened in 2003 at Queensway Shopping Centre in Singapore, grew to fifteen boutiques, founded the Culture Cartel festival, and did a Consortium Superstar 80s in 2017 under CP9714. It opened its first India store in January 2024 at Ambience Mall in Gurugram, and founder Mandeep Chopra said at the time that India held immense potential and that the store marked the beginning of the journey there. This shoe is that sentence collecting on itself. Chopra’s line on the collaboration is that it is about showing Indian culture has a place within global sneaker design, and notably, no adidas executive is quoted anywhere on the release, while adidas India was happy to put its brand director on record for the Ranveer Singh pair four months earlier.
Pricing came in at 11,999 rupees in India and 179 Singapore dollars in Singapore, roughly 125 and 141 US dollars at current rates, so the Singapore market paid about twelve percent more for the same shoe. None of those figures carries brand confirmation. adidas’ newsroom has no release on this shoe, neither Sneaker Bar Detroit nor JustFreshKicks covered it at all, and Limited EDT delisted both product pages after they sold through, so the numbers rest on Hypebeast and the Indian and Singaporean trade press agreeing with each other. The only market signal available is a European boutique asking 530 euros against a 730 euro list, which is one shop’s consignment ask rather than sales data, and it should be read as nothing more than that.
The Limited EDT x adidas Superstar Consortium “Made in India” released August 8 in India and August 12 in Singapore, limited to 350 numbered pairs, in unisex UK 3 to UK 13. Style code HP4048, with the Special Collectors Edition listed as HP4048S, taken from Limited EDT’s own product URLs. Both editions are sold out and delisted. For more, see our adidas coverage and the JENNIE Superstar SQ Ballet, another 2026 attempt at making the shell toe argue for something.
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