The Adidas Superstar: Still Funky After All These Years
Celebrating 50 Years of Adidas Superstar Sneakers
It was way, wayyy back in the day — 1969 to be right and exact — when German shoemaker Adi Dassler’s triple striped Superstar sneaker, with its scalloped “shell toe” design, began to make tracks across the basketball courts of America. B-ball players favored the durable leather and rubber construction of the shoe, a sharp contrast to the flimsy canvas make of the majority of sneakers heard squeaking across the court. By the mid-1970s, nearly three-quarters of all NBA players were wearing them.
From 1973 to 1975, while Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Milwaukee Bucks was wearing the Adidas Half Shell (the model with half a shell on the top of the toe and suede across the toe box), kids across America —particularly those in the inner city— were clamoring to wear the same shoe as that worn by the popular 7-foot-2 basketball star. And when Abdul-Jabbar was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers in ‘75, his popularity with young fans continued to grow, along with corporate interest.
In 1976, Abdul-Jabbar entered into a then record-breaking, multi-year contract with…
