The Larry June x adidas Adistar Control 5 releases September 12 at $160 under style code KZ7294, and it is the first pair from the partnership the public can actually buy. A friends-and-family version of the same shoe circulated during Super Bowl week in San Francisco earlier this year, which is a very Bay Area way to start a collaboration and a very Larry June one.
The Adistar Control 5 is a 2008 running shoe, and adidas has been trying to make it land for two years. It arrived with a Formotion heel unit for stability and a torsion bar through the midfoot, the kind of engineering language the brand used before minimalism and then maximalism took turns running the category. A quiet relaunch started in 2025 and adidas pushed harder at the beginning of 2026. It has not broken through the way retro runners from other brands have, though a few versions landed, notably Unheardof’s “Piggy Runner” run and a Puerto Rico tribute. That is the situation this collaboration walks into. The shoe has good bones, real heritage, and no personality that the public has agreed on yet.
That gap is worth understanding, because it is not a design failure. The Adistar Control 5 is a stability shoe, and stability shoes are the least romantic corner of running. Nobody builds a mythology around pronation control. When Nike and ASICS reissue late-2000s runners they are usually reissuing something that was fast or something that was worn by someone famous. adidas is reissuing a shoe whose selling point was that it kept your ankle where it belonged, and the way through that is not nostalgia. It is giving people a different reason to look.
Larry June supplies one. The gradient mesh base starts green at the heel and shifts to red through the midfoot, where the Three Stripes are split between green and yellow. Beiges handle the overlays and the midsole and keep the thing from becoming a highlighter, with reflective silver trim running through the overlays. His name sits on the tongue tag, and all three neons turn up again on the outsole. The palette is not decoration for its own sake. The San Francisco rapper has built an entire public identity around citrus, cold-pressed juice and organic produce, to the point that an orange functions as his logo. A shoe in fruit colors from Larry June is about as legible as sneaker collaborations get.
That legibility is the argument for why this one might work where the others have not. The Adistar Control 5’s problem has never been the shoe, it is that nobody has given people a reason to care about it specifically. Unheardof and a regional tribute are boutique moves, good for the people already looking. Larry June brings an audience that does not overlap much with retro running and a visual identity so consistent that the shoe explains itself on sight. adidas has a long habit of pairing dormant silhouettes with artists who have a coherent aesthetic, and this is a better fit than most of them, because the colors were going to be orange and green regardless of what shoe he was handed.
At $160 this sits above a general release Adistar Control 5 and below where adidas prices its higher-profile music collaborations. That is the correct band for a first public release from a partnership still establishing itself, and it is low enough that the shoe can sell to people who like the colorway rather than only to people who follow the artist. The friends-and-family pair from February is the one that will carry a premium, since almost nobody has it and it is the same silhouette in a different makeup. Worth noting that a Rod Laver with Larry June has already been previewed, built around multiple animal skin textures, so this is a partnership with a plan rather than a one-off. Two silhouettes from two different corners of the adidas catalog, one running and one tennis, is how the brand builds someone into a long-term partner rather than a guest.
The Larry June x adidas Adistar Control 5 arrives September 12 at $160, style code KZ7294, through adidas and select third-party retailers. For more from the brand, see our Simone Rocha collection piece and our adidas coverage.
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