Pharrell X Virginia X Adidas Adistar Jellyfish Triple Black

Triple Black lets you wear an experimental shoe without the outfit becoming a costume. Recipe one: full black technical, tapered nylon trousers and a black shell jacket, where the jellyfish ridges read as the only texture in an otherwise flat outfit. Recipe two: contrast the shape rather than the colour, with wide off white trousers and a grey knit, so the black shell sits like a sculptural object at the floor. Best for evenings, city nights and anywhere the lighting is directional enough to show the ribbing. Sculpted shells run less forgiving than mesh, so try your true size and check the instep. Clean with a soft damp cloth only: brushes will scratch and dull the ridged surface.

adidas effectively invented the modern designer sneaker partnership, starting with Yohji Yamamoto's Y-3 and Stella McCartney from 2004, then extending through Jeremy Scott, Raf Simons and Alexander Wang. Pharrell Williams sits in that line as a designer collaborator rather than a face, which is why his adidas work is allowed to be genuinely odd instead of just recoloured. The brand's willingness to hand over authorship is what separates its collaboration record from its competitors, and it comes from a company that has twice been redefined by people outside it, most famously when Run-DMC put My Adidas on record in 1986 with no deal in place.

The whole shoe turns on the outer shell. A ribbed, sculpted cage sits over the upper, giving the Adistar an exoskeleton rather than a panel and overlay structure, and in Triple Black that shell, the upper beneath it and the sole all share a colour so the form has to be read through highlight and shadow. adidas has form for this kind of engineering spectacle, from the adidas 1 of 2005 marketed as the world's first intelligent shoe with a microprocessor running five million calculations a second, to springblade replacing foam with splayed blades. The Jellyfish belongs to that tradition: a runner where the visible structure is the design argument, not a graphic on top of one.