Adidas Adilette 22 Slides Grey

Released on 4 March 2023 and part of the Adilette 22 line. This release has a synthetic upper in Grey Five/Grey Five/Core Black. The Adilette is the slide adidas has been making longer than most brands have made anything, and the 22 is the version that abandoned the flat poolside strap for a sculpted, almost geological shape. In grey it reads as an object more than a shoe: a single moulded form with a raised topography across the footbed, the Three Stripes cut into the strap rather than applied to it. This is adidas doing product design rather than heritage, closer in spirit to the engineering showmanship of the adidas 1 in 2005 than to anything in the Originals archive. You buy it for the shape, and the colour keeps that shape legible.