crooked tongues magazine News Features

adidas Originals always come correct with the Torsion reissues. The ZX 8000 is one of our personal favourites and conversations with some connected hip-hop folks who go way back and some Polo connoisseurs have raised this shoe's role in sub-cultures as an underrated moment of must-have status. For us, the 8000's cutaway was as shocking in 1989 as the visible Nike Air was in 1987. It was a serious development. The vast moulded heel counter, ghillie lacing and Purolite foam midsole just took the essence of ZX (bear in mind that the ZX 500 and Phantom were still on sale just a year before). We love the ZX 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 4500, 5000, 6000, 7000 and 9000, but the ZX 8000 is the one that really caught us offguard. The 8000 really worked in blue and yellow and the white and blue colourway that cropped up around 1990. The ZX 8020 was a nice little update too (alongside the 1020, 2020, 3020, 5020 and 9020) and the Torsion RX range gets kind of slept-on too. The entire Torsion realm is an untapped story.

This colourway of the shoe with the yellow bar and soft cell is beautiful. It works in an abundance of blue (well, actually it's a green, but we're inclined to think that it's a particularly bluey variant) and the suede is a better quality than the faux-suede of the original. Lab Green and Craft Orange is a great combination that's reminiscent of Patta's ZX 7000 that homaged Jerry Seinfeld's jacket in the 'Parking Garage' 'Seinfeld' episode. That outdoor gear feel can't touch the pure power of the colourways the models we mentioned in the paragraph above, but we like these a lot and they're in the Crooked Tongues store right now.