How adidas Forum came to dominate the sneaker game in the last year When a great classic takes it to the next level

2022 hasn't even started three weeks ago and we might already have the sneaker collaboration of the year, courtesy of adidas and Prada. While the two brands had collaborated before, it was the Prada x adidas Forum that attracted the most attention since it appeared on A$AP Rocky's feet last September. Realeasing today, it can be expected with some accuracy that the luxury reinterpretation of the adidas Forum will dominate the rankings of this year's sneaker collaborations, after having been the protagonist of an unprecedented slew of collaborations in 2021. The reason is simple: in a world of increasingly loud collaborations, the minimal-functional remake of such an iconic sneaker has already made it a classic. The announcement of the collaboration, after the 2021 release series, had already inflamed the Forum-mania in 2021 and represented the culmination of a strategy of collaborations that made the adidas Forum originally introduced in 1984 a real field of cultural experimentation throughout the past year, bringing it back to the forefront of the sneaker scene.

This is where the adidas Forum comes into play, which adidas has transformed from an icon crystallized in time to a vehicle of virtuous dialogue that connects all the different and distant points that dot contemporary culture. The idea of self-expression but also of cross-sectoral and inter-cultural dialogue are basically all represented by the sneaker itself as well as by the wide range of collaborations in which the Forum has been made the protagonist: the most striking cases, in this sense, are for example the collaborations with YiRan and with Arwa Al Banawi that enrich the concept of sneaker release with a discourse on craftsmanship, on multidisciplinarity, on emerging design niches ignored by the Eurocentrism of contemporary fashion, but also with a multicultural discourse that introduces the Italian sneakerhead to the work of a Chinese artist and the American sneakerhead to the aesthetics of a Saudi designer. The rest of the collaborations, on the other hand, involve the Latin American public with Bad Bunny, the African-American female community with Beyoncé but also the trans-national avant garde circle with its dialogue with Japanese designers. At the center of it all remains always and in any case the Forum - which thus becomes the blueprint of every future ambitious sneaker collaboration strategy.

The whole adidas Forum line-up is available online at Footlocker's official website.