adidas Skateboarding has the Kader back on November 16 in Aurora Coffee, Preloved Yellow and Core Black, and it is the first colorway that makes the shoe’s one borrowed idea impossible to miss. The three straps laid across the upper are not decoration. They are the closure. Putting them in speckled yellow against dark brown suede is the loudest possible way to point at that, and it slightly undercuts the argument the shoe is built on.
The Kader arrived on September 29 as Kader Sylla’s first signature model, and the reference adidas named for it was not a skate shoe. The brand went back to its Equipment basketball line for the bones. Equipment landed at the start of the 1990s as adidas at its most severe, built by Rob Strasser and Peter Moore around a single rule: a shoe carries what the athlete needs and nothing else. Decoration came off. The green and black was chosen because it read as modern rather than fashionable, against a house that had always leaned blue. The part that matters here is what Equipment did to the Three Stripes. Instead of leaving them as a graphic on the side panel, adidas turned them into a strapping system that physically held the foot down. The stripes became structure. That idea has been borrowed, softened and dropped repeatedly across the thirty years since, and the Kader is where it got picked back up.
On this pair the three straps run in a heavily mottled yellow, close to a cracked or reptilian print rather than a flat speckle, laid over black leather panels on a dark brown suede upper. The laces thread through them, so pulling the laces draws the straps closed across the midfoot. KADER is printed in yellow along the lateral panel, yellow contrast stitching picks out the seams, and a gold Trefoil sits on the black leather collar with adidas set below it. The collar rises above the ankle and is lined in off-white, which shows as a thin pale line along the top edge. Underneath is a black cupsole with a cream band running along the base. Turn it over and the forefoot carries a yellow pivot panel shaped into a broad star, cut into a brown zigzag tread, with a yellow Trefoil on a cream heel pad.
That outsole is the most considered part of the shoe. A skate shoe’s forefoot is where it dies, and marking the pivot in a different compound and a different color is a functional decision that happens to photograph well. adidas lists a leather and synthetic upper, a textile sockliner and a rubber outsole, which is less than the brand said about the first pair, where it named adituff underlays, a full-length Lightmotion midsole and tongue wings built into the construction rather than stitched on. None of those have been said to have gone anywhere, and a shortened spec block on a second colorway usually means the copywriter moved on rather than the shoe did, but it is the kind of silence worth checking before anyone buys on the strength of the first pair’s write-up.
Where this colorway gets interesting is the tension inside it. Equipment’s founding argument was that ornament comes off and the stripes do work. The Kader revived that argument honestly, and the debut colorway kept it quiet, black suede with purple straps, speckled just enough to stop a mid-top in two colors from reading as a team shoe. Aurora Coffee goes the other way. The straps are now the first thing anyone will see, the texture on them is the most decorative surface anywhere on the shoe, and the brown and gold palette is squarely in lifestyle territory rather than in Equipment’s. The structural idea has become the graphic again, which is precisely the thing Equipment was built to stop. Whether that is a betrayal or a joke depends on how seriously anyone was taking the history, and adidas has clearly decided the answer is not very. Sylla turned professional at sixteen and had been on the adidas Skateboarding team since 2021, given colorways of existing models rather than a shape of his own until September, so a second run that leans into ornament is also a sign the shoe is selling well enough to loosen up.
Retail holds at $110, the same as the black and purple pair in September, which is worth noting given how much signature skate footwear has drifted upward. It sits well under the $160 the BadBo 1.0 asks on the same release calendar, and it is priced where a skate shoe still has to justify itself against Lakai, Vans and New Balance Numeric rather than against a lifestyle mid. Holding the number on a second colorway rather than treating the first as an introductory price is the more meaningful signal here.
The adidas Kader in Aurora Coffee, Preloved Yellow and Core Black releases Monday, November 16 at 7 a.m. PT under product code LA7670, priced at $110, through adidas and select skate retailers.
Where To Buy
Affiliate links open each retailer’s live search, so they always resolve. We may earn a commission.
Find This Pair
- eBaySizes Available
Live retailer stock, refreshed hourly. Stock and prices change fast. Some links are affiliate links and we may earn a commission.
