It hasn’t been a great month for Adidas, but if the German sportswear giant can be counted on one thing these days (or over the last 20 years), it’s finding ways to squeeze some cash out of licensed sneaker deals. Next up: The Simpsons.
Earlier this month we got our first look at a Simpsons x Superstar collab, which sees nearly the entire surface of the shoe coated in blue fuzz to approximate Marge’s hair. It looks exactly like a pair of old Cookie Monster sneakers I once bought for my (then) two-year-old:
Another shoe in the lineup, one leaked earlier today and this time a Stan Smith, features Homer instead. While initially seeming a lot less involved than the Marge shoe — maybe there’s a balding joke here, I don’t know — flipping the shoe around reveals this one has some fuzz too, but only on the heel:
Like the meme itself, this is something you can chuckle at when you see it on the internet, but spending money to wear it on your feet? Hrmmmmmm.
Not that Adidas will care. While the company’s Yeezy collaboration has turned to ash, and had been worth big money at its peak, Adidas’ bread and butter in the sneaker business (like Nike’s), isn’t in high profile, limited releases but in two other places: for the most part, it’s the everyday roster of venerable classics (the Superstar, the Stan Smith, slides, etc) and to a lesser extent it’s tie-ins like this.
We’ve seen this a lot over the last few years, as the company has released sneakers based on everything from Game of Thrones to Pokémon to South Park to a previous Simpsons release, and while many of these come have come across looking a bit naff, some (Pokémon especially) have been great!
Leave a Reply