crooked tongues magazine News Features

The adidas Baltic Cup is one of those adidas Originals reintroductions that you don't see coming. Now known as the BC, we first saw the Baltic Cup in the Consortium Tabula Rasa pack that offered some significant reissues and alterations despite that unassumingly blank facade. And you knew that lead to more colourways, didn't you? But like last year's ZX 380 drops, the BC has been treated with a certain reverence. adidas Originals are aware that these ...

These aren't usually our kind of thing. The office is split on the Zoom Toki's appeal, and we'd kind of like to see the Sabaku pushed again, with its casual mix of Blazer and Chukka, or a campaign built around the Outbreak (we remember a retro hitting the sale racks a few years back). But the Manor is actually a decent shoe when it's given the premium treatment. We had an inline sample floating around for ...

If the adidas Consortium München is shaping up to be wildly out of your price point, these inline editions that are set for a March release still bring out the best in the shoe. For a while, a couple of these colourways were strictly a size? exclusive, and we flipped out over the green and white variations that are some of the best Münchens to date. Next month they arrive in the store. The chunk of that PU sole that ...

Who's testing the classic Nike Cortez? The 1970's archives have been pillaged for reissues, but few — bar maybe the Waffle Racer, Bruin and Blazer — can test the Cortez for icon status that harks back to the brand's earliest days. As Nike's 40th commences, we've seen some reissues that take it back to the essence. We're seeing reissues of the 1971 Cortez with the heel tab and different sole unit and we're ever seeing ...

The adidas München is a shoe we love. Some terrace classics need some sub-cultural context to assist an appreciation and others are a territorial affair. But the München is a shoe with wider appeal, like the mighty Trimm Trab, with the lightweight sole unit and keep fit/training intent. The shoe that had a curious Suisse spinoff in the early 1980's debuted at the end of the 1970's as the evolution of the München design. We've long ...

Over the last few years, New Balance have been putting out plenty of product that never used to make these shores. We quietly lusted after the United Arrows 997.5 design from a few years back that applied the pink pop to the upper but switched the 997's clean midsole for the more elaborate ABZORB sole that was usually affixed to the 998. It was a low-key mix of 1991 and 1993, and nobody could even be bothered to ...

Kazuki Kuraishi is one of the reasons we still have faith in the collaboration. Humble but remarkably talented, he knows everybody who needs to be known in Tokyo and has carved out his own lane as the go-to man to get it done. Having worked with Burton, BAPE, NBHD and visvim, he became affiliated with adidas Originals around the time of theexcellent BAPE collaboration in 2003. That affiliation became something bigger in early 2009, when the first ObyO Kazuki releases ...

Having been exposed to a steady stream of heritage ASICS product, it's tough to lose our minds over the same silhouettes time and time again. But who would have thought that - after its mid '00s re-release to relative apathy from the masses but unbridled enthusiasm — the Gel Lyte III would go on to become a hype phenomenon? When we went and grabbed the retros off the racks for less than £30 all those years ago, we did it with ...

These shoes are a chunky-soled slab of Nike history. The brand is 40 years old this year, and the Frank Rudy assisted Air breakthrough was pivotal in establishing their market dominance. That's not to say that Nike were struggling in late 1978 when the Tailwind went on sale at Honolulu stores in time for their winter marathon — they had a whole brace of running favourites with racing and Waffle soles, but Air was a hidden weapon that promised a ...

You've got to go the extra mile these days to grab our attention when it comes to representing your brand. Especially last week, when things were kicking off in Paris and Berlin, with a mystery Nike announcement brewing in NYC for good measure. It was too much to take in. So much so, that we ended up becoming apathetic towards pretty much everything. But Vans pulled it out the bag with their OTW launch on Wednesday night. The last ...