Feature: adidas Clean Classics

The interesting thing about Clean Classics is how little there is to look at. adidas took shoes everybody already knows and rebuilt them from different materials, and the brief was clearly that you shouldn't be able to tell.

What you can actually see

Three things give it away.

The midsole is speckled rather than flat white — flecked through with darker particles, because of what's in it. On a normal white trainer that would read as a scuff. Here it's the whole point, and it's the detail that makes these look like something rather than nothing.

The branding is debossed instead of printed. The Trefoil and the wordmark are pressed into the leather in the same colour as the leather, so they catch light rather than contrast. Tonal, and quieter than adidas usually is.

And the panels are cut oddly. Slightly angular where you'd expect a curve, with seams in unfamiliar places. That's a consequence of how they're cut rather than a styling decision, which we'll come to.

What adidas says went into them

These are the brand's claims rather than ours. We haven't been to the factories and we're not going to repeat any of it as though we had.

adidas says the uppers use Primegreen, which it describes as a set of recycled performance materials making up at least half the upper. It says the rubber compound is 90% natural and 10% recycled, with the natural part tapped from rubber trees.

The pattern cutting is the part that explains the shapes. adidas says it rearranged the components to sit on a smaller area of material before cutting, so less is left over — and the resulting panel shapes are specific to this range rather than to the original shoes.

Elsewhere the brand lists a foam made using harvested algae, sockliners containing recycled OrthoLite and bio-oil, insoles made from cork, and recycled polyester in place of virgin. The laces, it says, are paper.

Even the boxes were made from leftovers — misprinted stock cut down for packaging, which means the pattern on each one differs.

Whether it adds up

We can't tell you. That's an honest answer rather than a cautious one: verifying material composition claims is not something a shop can do, and anyone in retail telling you they've audited a supply chain of that size is overstating it.

What we can say is that the design decisions are visible rather than invisible. The speckle, the seams and the debossing are all consequences of the materials rather than decoration applied afterwards, and that's more than most efforts of this kind manage.

The one we took

The SC Premiere, in cloud white with an off-white sole and a green heel tab. Court shape, low profile, and it goes with roughly everything — which was probably always the plan for a shoe designed not to draw attention to itself.

This launched in September 2020. What we currently stock is in our adidas collection.