adidas and Tyrrell Winston closed out their trilogy today, and the shoe carrying it is the TW Spiritain 2000. The first two chapters were built around The Artist and The Athlete. This one is called The Fan, so the brief lands on the person who buys the ticket, keeps the jersey and has never taken a shot that counted for anything. The campaign makes that literal. A man sits alone on a yellow couch, popcorn across the carpet, a game playing somewhere out of frame.
The Spiritain 2000 is worth being precise about, because the coverage around it keeps treating the model as a retro and it is not one. adidas describes it as a silhouette inspired by Y2K running footwear, which is a very different claim from bringing an old shoe back. There is no original from that year to point at. What adidas built instead is a new runner wearing the proportions of the era: a tall slabbed midsole, a cage of layered overlays running nose to tail, and an open-weave mesh upper of the kind that largely disappeared once engineered knit took over.
The midsole even carries adiPRENE lettering along the sidewall, which is period dress rather than a spec sheet. That is the trick the whole model runs on. It is not reviving a shoe, it is reviving a look, and the look is specific enough that most people reading about it assume a reissue. Winston’s first adidas chapter used the Climacool, another name the brand has spent the last two years reattaching to new shoes rather than old ones. Two chapters in, the through line in his work is not a single silhouette. It is a cabinet of early-2000s adidas vocabulary, pulled out and applied to hardware that never existed back then.
Photographed up close, the shoe reads redder than the written palette suggests. adidas names the colors Off-White, Grey and Equipment Red, and in the campaign frames the red does nearly all the work. A deep open mesh covers the toe and the quarter, and the Three Stripes are cut from that same red and layered over a cream panel so they stand proud of the upper rather than sitting printed on it. The cream overlays have a visibly crinkled, pebbled surface, which matches the cracked leather adidas names in its release.
The small things are where the money went. A gold Badge of Sport sits low on the forefoot. The laces are red and waxed-looking, finished with metal aglets, and adidas says Winston’s signature is applied to those tips and to the heel. A glossy red clip wraps the back of the heel. The midsole and outsole are left cream throughout, which is an optimistic choice for a shoe the brand chose to photograph on a carpet covered in spilled popcorn.
What makes this the interesting chapter is the subject. Sneaker collaborations almost always flatter the person doing the thing, the athlete or the artist or the designer with the archive access. Winston, who adidas calls a Detroit-based artist, spent the final chapter on the person who only watches, and adidas let him shoot it as something well short of glamorous. A dim room, a turf carpet, a framed photo of somebody’s kid, a jersey on the wall, and the same face moving through hope and then collapse. Nobody in these pictures wins anything.
It lands differently in how the thing is being sold, too. The TW Climacool went out as a general release rather than a draw, and this one goes further, arriving in stores, online and through CONFIRMED on day one as part of a full head-to-toe collection. A trilogy about the communities around sport that ended in a limited drop would have been arguing with itself.
adidas has the footwear at $150, which puts it well under what this partnership has charged before. The TW Climacool was $220 last month. adidas collaborations through the autumn have run from the $130 Asphalt Samba up to the $300 Pharrell Jellyfish, with the MENACE Adistar Control 5 at $180 in between. Putting the anchor shoe of a full collection at $150 is adidas pricing the fan’s uniform roughly like something a fan would buy, which is the one place the concept and the invoice agree.
The Fan launched worldwide on October 22, in stores, on adidas.com and through the CONFIRMED app, with footwear in UK sizes 3.5 to 13.5 and apparel in 2XS to 2XL. The collection runs past the shoe to a Z.N.E. puffer, a workwear jacket and pants, a T-shirt and the 85 Cap, priced from $80 to $400. One caveat worth stating: adidas has not published a style code for the Spiritain 2000. JustFreshKicks lists it as KJ7676 and says in its own copy that adidas has not confirmed it.
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