There will be many a year-end list about the top fashions of the year — the most buzzed-about designer collections, the new popular stores, the best red carpet looks.
But really, we know this year in style was defined by one shoe — a white sneaker, suddenly and inexplicably seen on the feet of everyone cool you know.
But the fact that every hip girl and her brother were wearing Adidas Stan Smiths this year isn't actually that inexplicable. In fact, there's a simple explanation for it. Jon Wexler, the global director of Entertainment and Influencer Marketing at Adidas, broke down the plot in a talk this week at the speaker series OPEN Portland.
The sneaker has been around since 1964 and is named for the tennis champ Stan Smith, who won two Grand Slam singles titles in the 1970s. In 1972, the sneaker was officially christened with Smith's name and eventually his face, his image printed on the tongue of the shoe. According to Adidas, more than 40 million pairs of Stan Smiths have been sold since that era.
So how did Adidas take a shoe that had been around for basically ever and make it incredibly coveted? "We had to actually start three years in advance," Wexler said.