Feature: adidas SPEZIAL and Northern Soul

Every piece in this collection is named after somewhere in the north of England. Lotherton, Ashurst, Standish, Holbeck, Newsam, Pleckgate, Meanwood. Read the product list and you're reading a road atlas, which tells you most of what you need to know about SPEZIAL before you look at a single shoe.

Whose line this is

SPEZIAL is Gary Aspden's. He's a consultant, designer and collector who has run the line since it started in 2014, digging shoes out of the adidas archive and rebuilding them properly rather than reissuing them cheaply. It has a following that spans a much wider age range than most sneaker releases, which is unusual and says something about how it's put together.

He's been blunt about what he thinks of the resale market — people who price trainers on what they'll fetch have got it, in his words, exactly the wrong way round. Worth remembering on a shoe that's now only findable second-hand.

Where summer 2020 went

The theme was British soul, and it wasn't only Northern Soul. Aspden traced a line from the all-nighters of the seventies through the house and jazz crossovers of the eighties into nineties acid jazz — three scenes, one continuous thread.

Northern Soul is the part everyone knows. Working-class kids in the north hunting down rare, fast American soul records nobody else was playing, dancing to them in the clubs and dance halls of Wigan and Blackpool, while London's soul boys built their own version of the same thing. What came out of it shaped how British men dressed for decades afterwards, and the terrace clothing that followed owes it a great deal.

The two we had

Four shoes came out. We carried two.

The Ashurst SPZL is built from the adidas Sydney, which came out of the City Running Series and is genuinely hard to find in its original form. Grey nylon upper, mesh across the toe, yellow leather stripes on the quarter panels and netting on the midsole. It's the more obviously seventies of the pair.

The Lotherton SPZL goes back to the Ardwick, a shoe from the very first SPEZIAL collection, and reworks it in a beige suede with a green leather heel tab and matching stripes, sitting on a black midsole and a gum sole. Lower and quieter than the Ashurst. It's the one we'd have worn more.

Both landed on 12 June 2020, alongside the Training 76 SPZL and the Zurro SPZL, which we didn't take.

One honest note

These sold through years ago and we don't have them. If you've come here looking for a pair, resale is the answer, and Aspden would probably rather you wore them than kept them boxed.

What we currently have is in our adidas collection, though it's running trainers rather than anything from the archive.