adidas Originals and Willy Chavarria put the Megaride back out on October 3, and this time the shoe arrives with its skeleton on the outside. The Willy Mega Mid is a black, mid-cut build wrapped in a moulded cage that runs from the midsole up over the quarter panel, and it is the most structurally aggressive thing this partnership has produced. In January the same collaboration was a cream runway shoe that most people filed under fashion week and forgot. Nine months is not long to travel that distance.
The Megaride is not a new silhouette and it was never a fashion one. It is an early-2000s adidas running model, revived after roughly two decades for the cushioning system it takes its name from, a system adidas has described in its own press materials as exaggerated. That is an unusually plain word for a brand to use about its own product, and it is the right one. The Megaride midsole is the entire proposition, a deep slab with scooped cavities cut through it, and for most of the model’s life everything above that midsole was along for the ride. Chavarria’s version arrived on January 30, 2026 in cream, four days after walking the ETERNO runway in Paris, and at the time it read as a designer one-off. It was not. The name has spread across adidas since, onto a football-derived Megaride F50 among other things, and the cream pair turned into a sub-line rather than a footnote.
The Willy Mega Mid takes that midsole and buries it under structure. A lattice of oval cutouts wraps the lower half of the shoe and climbs the sidewall, so the cage and the cushioning read as one continuous component instead of an upper sitting on a sole. The collar rises above the ankle, which is where the Mid in the name comes from. The upper is black on black on black, with a dark green panel at the heel that only resolves under direct light. The red is rationed and deliberate. A red pod runs down the centre of the outsole and CHAVARRIA sits in red block capitals on the lateral side, and those are the only two places any color appears. Laces are left long and untied in every press frame, which is a styling call rather than a construction one, though it does tell you how adidas wants the shoe read. What the photography does not show is a foot in the shoe, so how much of that collar height is real support and how much is proportion is still an open question.
Worth noting what adidas actually calls these. The release names the low-cut pair the Mega Willy Low and the mid-cut pair the Willy Mega Mid, swapping the word order between two shoes described in the same paragraph of the same document. That is a small thing, and it is also what a sub-line looks like when it grows faster than its naming convention. The larger read is trajectory. Chavarria’s first Megaride was quiet enough to be mistaken for runway-only product. This one is built to be identified from across a street, and the cage is doing work the cream pair left to the silhouette alone. Whether that reads as growth or as overcorrection depends on what anyone wanted from the partnership. Chavarria’s clothing has always run on proportion and volume rather than on graphics, so an exoskeleton is a more consistent answer from this designer than a print would have been.
Retail is $280 for the Mid, with the Low at $230. That is a real step up from the cream Megaride AG, which this site logged at $200 back in January, and it puts the Mid at the top end of what adidas charges for a lifestyle collaboration. The cage is presumably where that money goes, since it is a separate moulded component rather than a print or an embroidery, and it is the part of the shoe a factory has to tool for. The Low at fifty dollars less is the same cushioning system in a shape more people will actually put on, and it is the version likely to decide whether this drop is remembered. Neither price includes a style code yet, which is unusual this close to a global release date and makes retailer tracking harder than it should be for a drop with signups already open.
The adidas Originals x Willy Chavarria collection releases October 3 globally, with signups opening September 28. The Willy Mega Mid is $280 and the Mega Willy Low is $230, both through the CONFIRMED app, at adidas.com/willychavarria and at select retailers worldwide. adidas has not published style codes for either shoe, so there is nothing to search on yet. The collection also carries apparel, including the Chavarria Chicano Sweatshirt the brand built around the colors of the Mexican flag.
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