crooked tongues magazine News Features

The adidas Consortium line is banging out the good stuff at the moment - this weekend's drop of three running makeups is proof positive that the rollout's on a roll in 2010, but we wouldn't want you to avert your gaze from what the easier-to-obtain pieces are saying this Spring. We briefly hyperventilated about a ZX 5000 that steered from the formula with a certain level of expertise, and these bad boys are set to drop next month too. ZX 500s are classy too. That a design like this dropped in 1984 is taken for granted - this was a shoe ahead of its time, and while few are going to buy it for high mileage training twenty-six years down the line, it hasn't aged in the slightest. In fact they still look the business (that wasn't a reference to any lamebrain Brit clobber/crime flicks either), with one of the meanest outsoles of any runner too. When we got the call to rework a shoe for aZX, like the footwear magpies we are, we went Softcell and Torsion, but there was some serious debate as to whether we should keep it more timeless with this silhouette. That yellow, black and grey could have worked a treat here too.

Fortunately there's another failsafe combo (witness that 8000 from last month) that wins each time - the EQT palette. Green, white, grey and black kills it - Supports, Racers, Cushions and Racings are that next wave after the ZX changed the brand's design language in an appropriately classy way, and with a little nod here, we're impressed. This season's ushered in some banging - actually, that sounds a little vulgar when we're talking sublime shoes so we'll rephrase it - superior makeups of this '80s performance dynasty, and with the mesh, leather, synthetic materials, black ghilly lacing system and perforations on the heel, this is another hard-to-hate, condensed adidas history in a shoe that we'll have in-store for March.