In one of the most exciting Adidas promotions since the Adicolor series in 2006. Last August 08, 2008, during the opening day of the Olympics, Adidas released the 1st batch of sneakers for the aZX Project.
What is the aZX Project? The aZX Project is a series of 24 adidas ZX shoes worked by 24 of the top Adidas Consortium stores. Adidas assigned each letter of the alphabet to a corresponding Consortium store, all are represent except for, ZX.
The ZX stands for the ZX series which the stores will use as their canvas for their collaboration with Adidas. There hasn’t been an event with so much hype since 2-3 years ago, first with the Adidas Superstar 35th Anniversary and the year after, the Adicolor series.
For the 35th anniversary of an Adidas classic, they collaborated with different sources of inspiration to form 5 groups of sneakers: the Consortium series, Anniversary series, Music series, Expressions series and Cities series. The Consortium series is similar the aZX project in terms of working with top Consortium stores such as Union, FootPatrol, Undefeated and Neighborhood, which become one of the most sought after shoe of this series.
The Cities series represented the top cities where Adidas has had deep cultural impact, while for the Expressions series, they collaborated artists from different background. The Expressions series also gave us the first glimpse of the Adicolor series and the new campaign branched out from the Adicolor version of the Superstar, where-in included in the package are 5 different colored laces which allows the user to customize the shoe to his favorite colored lace.
The Adicolor series which primarily draws from the shoe customizing culture during the 80’s. Kids wanted their kicks to look fresh and would paint or draw on their sneakers to have that sense of individuality. Since that time, sneaker customizers have taken customizing to another level, using different materials, paints and methods, even selling them at high prices, almost like art pieces.
For the Adicolor series, Adidas used 6 primary colors: white, red, blue, yellow, green, pink and black. And from that selection, took 6 different models and worked with different designed to put their own touch into it, with the limitation being they had to work along their color group. Another series not shown in the chart is the white series, which consisted of jackets, caps and shoes along with painting materials which allows the buyer to customize the item with their own preferred colorway. Other things that are customizable in this series aren’t visible much to the eye, some shoes allow the changing the color of the 3 Adidas stripes, sticking additional buttons/logos to the shoe, or being able to change the color of the tongue and laces.
So for this year, the buzz is around the aZX Consortium Project. The first batch, which consists of letters A-G, has already been released. The chart below shows the preview and I will talk more about this series in the next post.
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