crooked tongues magazine News Features

Lately the adidas Originals designers have been pulling it out the bag with makeups. Some other brands have had us pulling gas faces with their sullying of classics, but adidas have toned down the madness and pumped out some of the most memorable remixes of our favourites lately. For every mental 'Games Pack' there's something like this at the moment- pretty offbeat, but extremely wearable. Another policy we keep is that you can go a little crazy on the upper, within reason, provided a faithful reproduction the original makeup is available too. That's been the case with the 5000's return to the range. Back in the day, we were seduced by the £85 fanciness of the 9000 and Edberg Comps when our attention turned to Torsion's rotation-friendly Kevlar allure, and this simple silhouette didn't get the look in it deserved with us. Now it gets the last laugh by aging better than its contemporaries that shared shelf, as the speedy sale of the retro from the Crooked Store testified. But that success was partially down to an incredibly neutral colour scheme.

This is something a little different; reminding us of our 2006 New Balance 1500 excursion in some (tenuous) ways, but this is very much its own shoe. The white direct inject midsole blends into the hefty plastic heel counter, a primary feature of our favourite Torsion runner, and on black suede, it's accentuated even harder, grey and an almost infrared reflective stripes, heeltab and forefoot visibility make it look less innocuous than it ever did next to the rest of the 1989 ZX familia. The soft black mesh maintains the fabric essence of the original, but this genuinely works as a more brutal reworking of a great, great runner. As long as those retros stay true to the blueprint, we're stoked to see more ambitious companion pieces like this getting released too, and these will be available to order from the Store soon.