Pharrell’s Jellyfish Returns in Red and Storm, and One of Them Already Dropped

adidas Originals and Pharrell Williams add two colorways to the VIRGINIA Adistar Jellyfish on October 24, Red and Storm, and only one of them is new. The Storm already had a limited release in Los Angeles during ComplexCon in early October, reported by two outlets at the time, which makes October 24 the wider drop rather than its debut. The brand’s own announcement presents the pair as arriving together.

The Adistar Jellyfish began as an adidas running shoe and has been pushed a long way from it. Adistar is a performance running name with decades behind it, and what Pharrell’s team did was inflate the proportions, thicken the midsole into a flowing shape meant to read as a jellyfish in motion, and bury the rest of it under a sculptural cage. The outline of the old runner is still there if you look for it through the midfoot, and almost nothing about its balance survived the translation. The cage is the part that gives the shoe its silhouette, and it is also the part that makes it unwearable for the purpose the original was built for.

It worked anyway. The Jellyfish was named Shoe of the Year at the 2025 FN Achievement Awards, a real trophy behind a shoe most people first met as a photograph they were not sure was a render. The franchise has run through a steady line of colorways since, Triple Black, Royal Blue, Triple White, Crystal Sand and a Dark Brown with Frozen Green among them, mostly in small numbers. It sits in the same platform as the VIRGINIA Watermoc, and a long way from the Adistar XLG 2.0 that adidas builds for everyone else.

Red is the louder of the two and the more literal reading of its name. The upper runs tonal red across mesh and molded overlays, the Three Stripes and the cage straps are black, and the layered panels along the midfoot carry a muted blue that only resolves in the dark. Those molded TPU sections are the glow element, described as taking their cue from the gills of a jellyfish, and the press set includes a frame shot in darkness where the entire lateral side lights up in blue and violet. It is the most convincing image in the kit and it is doing the selling.

Storm goes the other way. Grey and onix carry the upper, black fills the Three Stripes, steel blue runs through the layered panels, and volt green is kept to the heel and the underside where it does the most with the least. VIRGINIA is set into the lateral panel in the same green. The outsole on both pairs is a black lug pattern deep enough to belong on something built for a trail, which on a shoe this sculptural is either a joke about the Adistar’s running past or the only part of the design that still remembers it.

The early Storm release is the part worth watching. adidas has been using the VIRGINIA truck and event activations to put these out ahead of the calendar, and a ComplexCon drop three weeks before a global launch is a soft launch wearing an exclusive’s clothes. It gets the sellout story twice on one shoe, once for the people who were in Los Angeles and once for everyone who was not. The CONFIRMED sign-up that opened alongside the announcement is the usual signal that the global run is not large either.

The open question is whether the franchise holds its position now that the award year has closed. Shoe of the Year is a one-time halo, and the Jellyfish is deep enough into its colorway run that each new pair competes with the five or six before it rather than with anything else on a shelf. Red and Storm are the first two to arrive without that cycle behind them, and a red colorway built around a glow feature is a reasonable way to find out whether the shape alone still carries a release.

Both pairs retail for $300, which is where the Jellyfish has sat since the Triple White, so nothing has moved. That figure is the top end of adidas Originals collaboration pricing and it has made the franchise divisive since the first pair landed. The argument the shoe keeps winning is that nothing else at any price looks like it, which is also why adidas is comfortable putting a sixth and a seventh colorway into a single year. The pairs that released in small numbers were never the test of that. The global drops are.

The VIRGINIA Adistar Jellyfish releases October 24 at $300 a pair, in Red under style code KK0633 and Storm under KH6728, globally through adidas.com, the CONFIRMED app, the adidas app and select retailers. Sign-ups opened October 19.

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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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