ADIDAS CAMPUS 80S 'MONOTONE PACK': SINGLE COLOUR CLASSICS

We don’t know what shoe we prefer. The adidas campus has long skirmished with the Stan Smith for our affections, because it’s the sort of shoe that unites the skaters, the adi traditionalists and the hip-hop folks. It’s perfect. This shoe has a legacy under some assumed identities — the Celtics-centric Greenstar, the Jabbar-endorsed Tourmanent and in the early 1980s it became the Campus. This shoe has been available in this superb shape since late 2007 after years of struggling in that curious Campus II form that made a once-desirable design a high street basic. We still credit CT legend C-Law with bringing this one back properly. But what happens when you remove the aesthetic safety blanket of a white or off-white sole from this design? You get the distant relative of those 1990-era Forums in a block colour that our friend Frank the Butcher reissued a few years ago and you get an all-red shoe.

Of course, in a normal world, nobody would fixate on an all-red shoe, but since Kanye put out that all red everything Louis Vuitton Don (inspired, as we recall, by some costume design in David Lynch’s barely comprehensible yet still compelling Dune adaptation) in 2009, red-on-red has been the signifier of an aspirational existence, even when it’s put on something as simple as a Campus. It’s nothing particularly new — we recall a point in the early 1990s where we’d probably trade a liver for all red suede Fila F13s or Air Flight Mids. But in the early 2010s, Red Balanciagas were a hood classic for those with dough. Even Vans Authentics shifted units when they went monotone and those Independence Day AM90s in red resell for crazy money. adidas got on it with Big Sean, but that always came off real Yeezy-lite. It’s a very 21st century phenomenon, not least because it’s not exactly an easy look to pull off properly. But with Mr. West’s well documented (and trust us, we haven’t even scratched the surface of that hype) move to adidas, this Campus seems like a statement of intent.