The adidas Superstar and the Shell Toe That Outran the Court

On July 19, 1986, Run-DMC played Madison Square Garden, and when they got to My Adidas, the arena filled with sneakers held overhead. Most of them had a ribbed rubber cap over the toe. The group's co-manager, Lyor Cohen, had been working to get adidas people in front of exactly this kind of moment, and the endorsement that followed is usually reported at $1 million. That figure has been repeated for forty years. Nobody has published the contract.

The shoe in the air was the adidas Superstar. It had been built seventeen years earlier for a very different crowd.

A Leather Shoe in a Canvas League

In 1969 American basketball ran on canvas, and the canvas was mostly Converse. adidas wanted in. Its answer was a low-top version of its Pro Model basketball shoe, the first low-top basketball shoe with an all-leather upper, sitting on a sole that didn't mark the floor and capped with a molded rubber toe. The cap gave the shoe its nicknames, shell toe and shell top. It also gave adidas a sales pitch. Leather supported the foot better than canvas, and the shell protected toes that got stepped on in the post.

The selling was done team by team. adidas consultant Chris Severn took the shoe around the league, and the Superstar moved through college and pro locker rooms over the next few years. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wore it, and George Gervin is the other name that always comes up.

Then there is the number. adidas lore says that by 1973 roughly three quarters of NBA players wore Superstars. Some tellings push it to 85 percent. No one has produced a roster count to back either figure, so treat both as marketing folklore that happens to point in the right direction. The Superstar was plainly the dominant shoe in the league for a stretch of the early 1970s. Exactly how dominant is a guess.

How Did Hollis Steal It?

By the late 1970s newer designs had pushed the Superstar off the court, and it drifted onto the street, where it was tough, available and everywhere. In Hollis, Queens, Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels and Jason Mizell wore theirs with the laces pulled out and the tongues pushed forward, with tracksuits, leather jackets and black hats. The same clothes on stage and off. That was the whole idea, and our history of hip-hop menswear covers how radical it looked at the time.

My Adidas came out in 1986. The song is usually described as partly an answer to Felon Sneakers, an anti-sneaker track by Jerrald Deas. Run-DMC flipped the premise into a love song about a shoe, and the Garden did the rest. The deal is widely described as the first endorsement between a hip-hop act and a major sportswear company, and a Run-DMC clothing line followed. Whether it was truly the first is hard to prove. Nobody has made a convincing case for an earlier one.

Skaters, NIGO and Fifteen Million Pairs

The Superstar never really left after that. Skaters picked it up as the 1990s turned into the 2000s, with Mark Gonzales among the names tied to it, and adidas eventually built a proper skate version, the Superstar ADV, in 2015. In Tokyo, NIGO worked A Bathing Ape into the shoe's story through collaborations in the 2000s, part of the traffic between Japanese streetwear and American sportswear we trace in our Ura-Harajuku guide.

For the 35th anniversary in 2005, adidas released 35 models across five series, each built with names from music, fashion and art. It treated a single silhouette as a catalog of collaborations, a logic that would soon drive the Nike Dunk and the whole Supreme drop model.

The commercial peak came later than most people assume. adidas sold more than 15 million pairs in 2015, making the Superstar its best seller that year. It was the era of the clean white sneaker, and the shell toe shared shelf space with its football cousin, the adidas Samba, and with Nike's all-white staple, the Air Force 1.

The Shell Toe Now

The current lineup says a lot about how adidas sees the shoe. The Superstar XLG of 2023 inflated the sole and upper for the platform crowd. Then, in February 2025, adidas reverted the Superstar II to the plain Superstar name. The II had appeared mostly on collaborations and special releases, and dropping it put the original name back on the shoe most people actually buy.

What hasn't changed is the toe. Hold a new pair next to a photo from the early 1970s and the shell gives it away, the same ribbed rubber cap, the same three serrated stripes, the same flat, low profile. The release timeline is laid out on the Superstar Wikipedia page, and Mr Porter has a good account of how Run-DMC earned their stripes. Our adidas hub collects the rest of the three stripes, and the competition is in the sneaker history archive and the sneakers section.

Pull the laces out of a new pair today and the tongue still flops forward the way it did in Hollis in 1986.