Adidas Adifom Q Clay Strata

The adiFOM Q is what happens when adidas stops treating a shoe as an assembly of parts and moulds it as one object. The Q shape refers to the sculpted, cut through form of the upper, a design that only exists because injection moulded foam allows shapes that stitched leather never could. It belongs to the same appetite for spectacle that produced the adidas 1 of 2005, marketed as the world's first intelligent shoe with a microprocessor running five million calculations a second, and springblade with its splayed blades instead of foam. Clay Strata is the colourway that grounds it, a muted terracotta brown that makes an aggressively futuristic silhouette look like pottery rather than plastic. That contradiction is the appeal.