adidas Climacool Futurecool Adds a Tongue to the 3D-Printed Shoe and Caps It at 400 Pairs

adidas is printing another shoe, and this time the interesting part is not the printing. The Climacool Futurecool arrives September 3 in Off White and Core Black at $180, through a draw on the adidas CONFIRMED app that is open now. The run is 400 pairs. What separates it from the printed adidas shoes that came before it is smaller than a lattice pattern and more telling. This one has a tongue.

Climacool has been an adidas word since the early 2000s, when it named a ventilation system rather than a shoe. In that first life it meant cutouts, channels and mesh, a set of tricks for moving air through a running shoe that every brand was chasing at the time. The brand has since attached it to its additive manufacturing platform, where the whole point is that airflow is a structural property instead of a mesh panel. The version that landed July 2 made that literal. It printed as a single lattice with no separate upper, midsole or laces, a one-piece slip-on that adidas seeded on Paul Pogba, Trinity Rodman and Rodrygo Goes at the World Cup before anyone could buy it. Go back further and the lineage runs to Futurecraft 4D in 2017, the Carbon-printed midsole that adidas presented as the future of how shoes get made. Nine years later, printed adidas shoes still arrive in runs counted in hundreds. That gap between the pitch and the production number is the honest frame for anything the brand prints. The technology does things stitching cannot, tuning stiffness zone by zone inside one piece and cutting the parts count to something close to one. It has just never been asked to make a shoe at Samba volume.

The Futurecool narrows it. The upper is still an open printed lattice with airflow worked through the structure, but adidas has added rubber around the lower portion for abrasion protection, flared the base outward so the bottom reads as a recognizable sole, and put an asymmetrical tongue up top so the fit behaves like a normal shoe. Off White covers the structure with Core Black handling contrast. When the Futurecool first surfaced in an overseas preview it appeared next to another experimental adidas model built with a sock-like inner layer and an outer cage, and that pair is the one that still looks like a concept. The Futurecool is the one you could wear to a job. The difference between the two is not manufacturing, it is willingness to look familiar.

That is the read worth having here. Every step adidas takes with printed footwear moves toward looking ordinary, because the technology has never been the obstacle. Getting someone to wear a shoe that looks like a scan of a shoe has been the obstacle. Adding a tongue, a rubber rand and a flared sole is adidas conceding that point and designing around it. The 400-pair cap cuts the other way. A brand that wanted a product line would not route it through a CONFIRMED draw, and a draw is how you launch a collectible. So the design says everyday and the distribution says event, and until adidas prints one of these in the thousands, the distribution is the more honest signal.

Price lands at $180, which is the most normal thing about the shoe. Put it against what adidas is charging the same week and it sits mid-table rather than at the top. The Gazelle Indoor is $130, the Superstar Lo Pro is $120, and the Adizero Dropset Elite runs $275, with the JENNIE Superstar Square Toe Ballet sitting between them. The July Climacool went to launch without a confirmed price at announcement, so $180 is the first real number attached to a printed adidas shoe in this run. For context on where printed footwear started, Futurecraft 4D carried a price closer to premium performance than to a Gazelle. Whatever resale does with 400 pairs, the retail figure says adidas wants this compared to sneakers, not to prototypes.

Release details: The adidas Climacool Futurecool releases September 3, 2026, for $180 under style code LN3078, in an initial run of 400 pairs. The draw is running now on the adidas CONFIRMED app, with winners announced September 3. adidas has not said whether a wider release follows.

Where to buy: the adidas CONFIRMED app, with any wider release expected through adidas.com.

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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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