Does Adidas care? With the release of the new adiFOM Q, probably not

After the last outburst, it is hard to imagine Kanye West shutting up now. It is not unreasonable to think that his Instagram and Twitter feeds will be abuzz again, now that Adidas has announced the impending launch of their new shoe, the adiFom Q. Even we can’t ignore the obvious: That this pair of all-foam kicks has more than a passing resemblance to the freaky form of the Yeezy Foam Runner. In fact, we had thought, just looking at the side profile of the show in photographs released by Adidas, that the Yeezy Foam Runner had struck again with a sibling. As it turns out, this new EVA shoe has really nothing to do with Mr West.

On closer look, the shoe is different, even if both are are exoskeleton with ameboid holes (or shifting boomerang?). And Adidas was quick (preemptive move against a possible Kanye West attack?) that its Yeezy-seeming kick is based on 2901’s Quake, now considered an “archival” model. Like the shoes that supposedly will make you tremble, the adiFOM Q has laces and those holes of curvy shapes on the sides. And to make sure the dissimilarity holds up, it comes lined with Adidas’s Primeknit-looking socks, which possibly (and oddly) constrict the feet under a tongue too, in a style of shoe that is supposed to allow the terminal part of our legs to be free and that we can then walk naturally, as if un-shod.

Footwear that looks like something extraterrestrials left behind seems to be the future. With different foams—basically EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate) or PU (polyurethane), or a compound of both—now offering all manner of forms, in weirder and weirder shapes and with odder and odder apertures, shoes, like clothes, are departing from the natural contours of our feet. In time, they will only be known as shoes in name, not by appearance. And Kanye West would be happy, at last, to say that he started it all.

Photo: Adidas