Our writer traces the history of the Adidas Gazelle and her mixed emotions about ’90s trends coming back into fashion.
I walked into a party recently where two hip young architects, clad in de rigueur black, were comparing their single allowable pop of color: identical neon orange Adidas Gazelles.
It seems to me like everyone’s wearing a pair right now.
And when I say everyone, I mean everyone, from the Gen Z cool kids at the fancy art school where I work to off-duty models and influencers to fictional scary minivan moms: On Yellowjackets, Showtime’s time-hopping soccer-grrrl cannibal drama, adult Shauna is rarely seen in anything but Gazelles, and she and her teammates wear them in the late-’90s flashbacks, too.
My reference point for evaluating any fashion trend is my own youth, like it is for pretty much anyone of any era. So, as a Baby Gen X, I’m inclined to see this present moment of three-stripe mania as naked nostalgia for the ‘90s. Gazelles and their slightly more structured cousin, the Samba, first caught my eye in the middle of that decade, after all, when Britpop and grunge and their respective styles grabbed me by the brainstem.
My confirmation bias-addled perception aside, though, the ‘90s don’t have an exclusive claim on Adidas—not by a long shot. Different varieties of Adidas attained icon status in subcultures like hip hop, punk, and rock long before I could so much as tie a pair of shoes.
Run-D.M.C.’s ode to the Superstar model, “My Adidas,” dropped in 1986, and Bob Marley was rocking three-stripe tracksuits and SL 72s way before that. Mick Jagger high-kicked in Gazelles in the ‘70s. Black American sprinter Jesse Owens took gold decisively at the 1936 Berlin Olympics—a thumb right in Hitler’s eye—while wearing Adidas cleats.
The company itself dates to 1924 Bavaria, a project the Dassler brothers, Adolf and Rudolf, started in their mom’s basement. The pair are credited with the innovation of adding spikes to athletic shoes. They were also Nazi party members, and their factory was temporarily converted into a wartime weapons manufacturing plant. They had a falling out in 1949, and Rudolf’s half of the company became Puma, while Adolf (“Adi”) continued under an amalgam of his own name, Adidas. (No, the Korn song “A.D.I.D.A.S.” aside, the name is not an acronym for “all day I dream about sex.”)
According to Reuters, 2023 was the first time the brand reported a financial loss in more than 30 years, which maps onto the roller-coaster ride that was their partnership with disgraced rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. In the fall of 2022, Adidas severed the formerly fruitful and lucrative relationship based on increasingly unhinged and antisemitic behavior from Ye, an extremely sensitive subject for a company with Nazi associations in its history.
But in 2024, they turned it around. Sales figures were excellent, even giving Nike a run for its money.
Besides shaking off the Ye stink, the brand had been getting lots of love from celebrities not actively melting down, like Harry Styles, during the Love On Tour, wearing multiple colorways of the Gucci x Adidas Gazelles collab, Bad Bunny adding his sought-after imprimatur to the brand with his well-regarded designs, and influential celebrities like Hailey Bieber, Jennifer Lawrence, and the Hadid sisters sporting Gazelles in pap shots blasted all over social media.
Saturation achieved.
Of course, what goes up must come down, and there’s a case to be made that the Gazelle wave has already crested. The New York Post recently sniffed that by virtue of their popularity, Gazelles are now “boring” and “uncool” and “a totally basic fashion faux pas.”
So, the fashion snake eats its tail once again—too many people jump onto a trend, and it becomes old news or worse. Gazelles are definitely due to be dethroned by the next big thing, laid aside in the back of the closet next to the Stan Smiths everybody was wearing circa 2015.
Both at the time and in retrospect, it seems to me that the aesthetics of the ‘90s were about nonconformity, about releasing ourselves from strict codes and the risk of being mocked for not wearing the right brand of jeans. Maybe that’s more about my own age at the time, my tentative teenage move toward independence in all realms, including fashion. Maybe everyone thinks their young adulthood specifically was an era of iconoclasm. Either way, it feels weird to me to see a garment that I associate so strongly with that era and ethos become so pervasive.
I see these shoes—and I see them everywhere—and they remind me of the era in my life where I started my lifelong veer away from conformity. My covetous nostalgia feels inorganic, lab-grown, and commodified. It feels like going along with the herd.
But they look so damn cool.
For most of the past year I’ve been navigating my own longing for a pair and holding fast against their siren song. I couldn’t afford them as a teenager which makes them intensely desirable to me as an adult—I knew buying a pair would bring the same triumphant rush that I got when I finally bought myself a proper pair of Dr. Martens in my 30s after wearing cheap knockoffs as a kid.
I’ve watched them become ubiquitous and start to emanate a whiff of the basic, which has really complicated my fascination. Do I really want to give in to conformity? I’m also in the midst of a yearlong no-clothes, no-exceptions buying fast, so I have been conveniently and entirely excused from the debate.
But my husband was paying attention. He was in fact listening when I would point them out, over and over, on people we saw walking around the city. He heard me as I dithered over my desire and congratulated myself on not caving on my clothing fast, unconvincingly insisting to myself that I didn’t even really want them anyway. He saw right through me, and also figured out the perfect loophole in the rules of my no-buy year.
For our recent wedding anniversary, he bought me—you guessed it—my very first pair of Gazelles, moss green with beige stripes and gum soles, more subtle and tasteful than I would have gone for if my resolve had cracked. They’re cozy and comfortable and make me look just like everyone else—I can pee anonymously in the short-walled bathroom stalls at work now.
I fucking love them.
As I’ve aged, a lot of the strict sartorial edicts I set for myself have fallen away. I had a stilettos-only phase that I released myself from when my ankles, knees, and I hit about 33. I’ve been in flat but still fussy brogues since then and it was only during the pandemic that I bought my first pair of sneakers that weren’t exclusively for running. I’ve even toyed with Gen Z’s visible-sock habit. A dresses-and-skirts devotee, I still can’t bring myself to wear pants in public, but I’m toying with it in my mind.
I don’t know if I’m overcoming my sneering teenage “you’ve never heard of them” phase, or if that promised middle-aged era of no fucks to give has finally arrived. I’m not sure it matters.
Scoff away, hypebeasts—former cool dude coming through.
Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness.
