Hartcopy’s mark is a red squiggle, the wavy underline a word processor puts beneath a word it thinks you have spelled wrong. It has now stitched that mark onto the one German army trainer in the world that is not a copy of something else. Margiela has sold a version. So have Dior and Hender Scheme. adidas was making the original and issuing it, which makes an edit mark on this particular shoe read less like a co-sign and more like a correction aimed at everybody else.
The BW Army began in the 1970s as an indoor training shoe for what release coverage describes as the German Federal Defense Force, which is the English name for the Bundeswehr. The initials are almost certainly that, though no source I can point to spells it out, so take it as strongly implied rather than confirmed. What is not in doubt is that this is a service shoe by origin, built to be issued rather than sold.
It also sits slightly outside the adidas family it resembles. The Samba, the Gazelle and the Superstar all wear the Three Stripes. The BW Army wears the same three panels in plain leather with no stripes on them at all, which is why it looks like a terrace shoe from a distance and like nothing in particular up close. That blankness is exactly why fashion houses kept reinterpreting it, and why adidas has been able to hand it to a different collaborator every few months without the shoe collapsing under the branding.
One framing to avoid: nobody revived this thing. adidas put out a BW Army Clean in 2008 and another reissue in 2017. What changed recently is volume. In the last two years the model has taken a fish and chips shop version from END., a canvas pack, a patent pack, a Kith release that was Ronnie Fieg’s first, a BSTN edition, a Whitaker Group rodeo pack and an origami interpretation shown at Copenhagen Fashion Week. adidas has even started a BW Run off the back of it. The shoe is not being rediscovered, it is being farmed.
Hartcopy is an unusual tenant in that crowd because it is not a store. Tim Suen and Sam Le Roy started it in 2020 during lockdown as a sneaker publication, shoes on white backgrounds with blocks of text explaining where they came from, and it has since put out hardcover books. It is a catalogue that collaborates. Five adidas projects in roughly thirty one months, four of them on this model, which is a working relationship rather than a guest appearance.
The Decon is the most pointed thing they have done with it. Release reporting describes the build as stripping out excess material and padding around the heel, leaving a slimmer shoe with a heel you can crush down and wear as a mule. That detail comes from a single outlet, so hold it loosely until somebody has a pair. If it is right, the joke is good: taking the structure out of a shoe whose entire reason for existing was being durable enough to hand to soldiers, until it folds flat.
Even the squiggle has two origin stories, which is oddly fitting for a brand named after printed matter. One account has it as the misspelling underline, the thing that appears under a word your software does not recognise. Another traces it to Hartcopy’s own logo and to printing, where a sinusoidal line belongs to the language of colour proofing rather than spellcheck. Nobody at Hartcopy has settled it publicly. Both readings land in the same place, a mark that exists to say something on this page needs another look, which is a strange and quite good thing to sew onto a shoe.
This is the Halo Gold pair, a matte gold build with tonal variation through the toe, tongue, heel and sole so it does not read flat, on a gum outsole. Its companion runs Crystal White and Grey One on leather with off-white at the toe, laces and heel. Both carry Hartcopy’s red stitch somewhere on the lace panel, though its exact placement has moved between drops.
Style codes are LA6836 for Halo Gold and LA6835 for Crystal White. Both released August 28 through adidas and Hartcopy, with the usual unnamed select retailers and not a single stockist named anywhere. There is no confirmed price. One outlet published TBA and another published an estimate based on what the 2024 pairs cost, and adidas has said nothing, so anybody quoting a firm number is guessing.
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