Feature: adidas Home of Classics

Four women, four businesses, four films. When adidas put out the Home of Classics collection we worked with Palmetto Studios on something better than a lookbook: we spent a day each with a florist, a baker, an illustrator and a tattooist, all of them running their own things in London, and filmed them working.

Nik Southern — Grace and Thorn

Nik is a London florist whose first love, by her own account, was a fiddle leaf fig. That turned into Grace and Thorn, which opened on Hackney Road in 2012 and has since become books, workshops and shops, with work for Estée Lauder, Alexander McQueen and Christopher Kane along the way.

Alex — Meringue Girls

Alex and Stacey started Meringue Girls in 2012, working out of an East London kitchen and turning out meringues in colours that shouldn't really exist in food. The Telegraph once called them the "punk princesses of baking", which is about right.

Alex took us round the kitchen and talked about how she got into it.

Joey Yu — illustration

Joey works in crayon and pencil, which sounds like a limitation until you see what she does with it — loose, fast lines that carry a lot of movement. She's worked with Hermès and Tate, and won It's Nice That's Graduate of the Year in 2017.

We filmed her at home in South West London, where she works.

Beth — Indigo Forever

Beth hand pokes rather than machines, which means every dot goes in individually and a piece takes as long as it takes. Her work is fine dot and line drawing, laid out to follow the shape of the body rather than sit on it flat, and it comes out of art, jewellery, symbolism and plants.

She splits her week between Hastings, where she draws, and a studio in London Fields, where she tattoos.

Who made the films

Maria and Justin work together as Palmetto Studios, doing everything from art direction to graphic design, and they live and work in East London. They've made things for Weekday and i-D among others. This wasn't the first time we'd worked with them and it wasn't the last.

The shoes

Home of Classics pulled four shapes out of the adidas archive from different corners of the brand's history. From basketball, the Nizza Hi and the Super Court. From the street side, the Stan Smith Recon and the Continental 80.

All four came in off-white premium leather, with the usual colour blocking taken out. The point was to make the shoe recede — which suited a project about the people wearing them rather than the shoes themselves.

The collection is long gone. What we currently stock is in our adidas collection.