Informing the Future - An Open Conversation With Gary Aspden at the adidas Made Originals Event

This past weekend, adidas took to London to celebrate the grand finale of its "made Originals" campaign. Shining a light on all of the brand's revered silhouettes, the campaign highlights how adidas Originals has helped shape almost every aspect of popular culture in one way or another with both historic and future icons

Upon entering the Ambika P3 performance space, lucky patrons were greeted with an open display showcasing the past, present and future of the adidas Originals brand through interactive displays, workshops, gaming platforms, a skatepark designed by Blondey Mccoy, and even musical performances from the likes of British rapper Slowthai.

While attending the event, The Sole Supplier was lucky enough to catch up with none other than Gary Aspden, a man who has played a key role in adidas' continual success in the UK and beyond. For those unfamiliar with Gary, his relationship with adidas dates back to the 1990s, when he managed relations with high-profile figures, eventually leading him to shift into collaboration and design and ultimately propelling the launch of the adidas Spezial line in 2014. As the Chief Curator of adidas Spezial, Gary has channelled his northern upbringing and deep knowledge of all things adidas and associated culture to produce some of the most iconic adidas collections to date.

"Well, I think to answer that question you've got to look at what adidas has been doing now for well over 20 years. It's always been ahead of the rest of the sportswear industry with the approach of bringing in third parties to collaborate with. I worked on a number of the early adidas collaborations at the turn of the century, everything from the first Stella McCartney vegan boxing boot in 2001 through to the first major co-branded streetwear collaboration with A Bathing Ape in 2003. adidas has opened itself up to working with creatives and designers for quite some time now, and I think adidas set the agenda for sportswear brands doing that."

"Back then other sportswear brands were also attempting to do it, but not with the same commitment or scale that adidas did. For adidas working with external partners has been a consistent thread for quite some time. I feel it's something adidas has a solid background in, and I personally believe the reason it understands it is because it has a lot of experience doing it. There are no plans to change that anytime soon and I believe that will continue to develop and grow. adidas has got such an incredible archive and design history that it's an absolute creative playground for anyone that's interested in product design to work with.”

"adidas at its core is a sports brand, always has been, and as far as I can imagine, it always will be. It is sport from which everything stems. When you take a shoe like the Gazelle or the Samba, they were originally designed for sports performance, with function and purpose at their core. That function and purpose have now been superseded by new sporting technologies, however, their aesthetic qualities and cultural cachet of these products lives on."

"adidas has so many products in its archives in footwear, apparel and accessories that have now become design classics. I've said this many times, but something like adidas Gazelle is now as valid as a desert boot or a brogue as far as a piece of classic footwear goes. Very few people I'd imagine are wearing Gazelles for athletic training nowadays, (which of course was their original purpose) but I can see in 30 years time that people will still adopt that shoe for both lifestyle and fashion because of its timeless design."

"To sum it up, sport and adidas Originals are inextricably linked. Even if something's coming out of Originals that's been worked on in collaboration with a fashion designer, when you distil that product down to its foundations, there's always going to be a connection to sport in its beginnings."

"So the Trefoil was designed in 1972, and what you have to remember is that it was the leading adidas brand mark for sport essentially its first 20 years. So from '72 to '92, the Trefoil was the brand mark you would see on any adidas sportswear. If you saw athletes in the Olympics or the World Cups or any major sporting event up to 1992 you would see the Trefoil. Then in 1992 when Rob Strasser and Peter Moore came over from Nike, they changed that brand mark to the badge of sport, or the ‘performance logo’ as some might call it”.

"When they changed the brand mark and launched the first Equipment range, Peter Moore had the idea of releasing the very first adidas Originals footwear range alongside that. He realised there was a consumer appetite for those classic adidas footwear designs. There were five shoes that were created for that first Originals range, each one representing a different sport. There was the Superstar for basketball, Stan Smith for tennis, Samba for football, Gazelle for training and the Country for running. In the '90s there was a very limited adidas Originals offering, and so a lot of deadstock hunters were out there trying to find other adidas styles from the '70s and '80s. Then when you get to the turn of this century, adidas Originals became a division of the company where it expands massively and in doing so acknowledges adidas's role in fashion, lifestyle and culture."

"Yeah! It's fascinating because I've been working with adidas since the late '90s, and I've been fortunate enough to witness and be involved in some of these changes within the sportswear industry. I remember my very first adidas marketing meeting in the late '90s, and the CEO at the time was a bit like ‘this is not a fashion brand,’ and then within a few years, adidas could sense the sea change and massively embraced that.

"I've got a first-class honours degree in Fashion Promotion from the University of Central Lancashire, where I started as a mature student at 24 years old. From there I was doing unpaid internships when I was 27 and I didn't start working for adidas until after I eventually graduated. At that point I was 29. The years prior to academia have informed my career arguably as much if not more so than what I did at college. What I did at college distilled and validated my insights and existing knowledge and I guess helped me to refine that into a skill base. Having said that, it was what I did prior to that which mattered and has been crucial to my career."

"I grew up in the north of England from a working-class background. My dad worked in a mill, my mum worked on the markets, and it was me and my older brother in a two-bedroom terraced house. I was wearing adidas in the '70s because my mum got it from the catalogue. My first pair of trainers were adidas Kick, my first pair of football boots were adidas Beckenbauer Supers. The first World Cup I can remember is the '74 World Cup when Franz Beckenbauer lifted the trophy. adidas was intrinsic to my upbringing, and when it got into the early '80s, that's when I started to become aware of fashion and like all the other kids I was growing up amongst, I began to seek out these products myself."

"Back then it was very much about adoption. We would go to sports shops and buy trainers and repurpose them for style. I suppose kids are still doing that now to some degree but the brands themselves are much more aware of their appeal and how to position themselves nowadays. Back then, it was much clearer about what style tribes were - you were either casual, or you were a mod, or you were a punk, or you were a skater - the dress codes were very defined. But now, I look at the way my 15-year-old son dresses, and he seems to take things and put them together in a way my generation would have never thought of."

"The lines have become completely blurred, and the rule book has been ripped up. It's interesting when you've had years of wearing those products and you know the cultural association to see a new generation find them and mix them up in a completely different way. The whole landscape has changed, the way kids get into clothes and music now is different because it's much more available since the internet came along."

"Back then, I was a kid who loved hip-hop and I remember hearing electro records for the first time and seeing the older lads I looked up to breakdance wearing European sportswear brands like adidas. Life is lived forwards, but it's understood backwards. When I look back on it, there was that whole working-class style thing going on that people call ‘casuals’ now, but the guys who were going to football and the hiphop kids here in the U.K. were dressing in very similar ways in the early 80s because for a period of time it was all rooted in sportswear. We were basing our style on what was available to us and kids went to great lengths and travelled overseas to get hold of brands and clothing no one else had."

"As a hip-hop kid, seeing images of guys in New York dressing in a certain way. The adidas Superstar for example, wasn't available to us at that time. For the U.K. B-Boys the Gazelle became our Superstar, if you will. My business partner has a theory that whatever you're into when you're sixteen, you'll probably be into it for the rest of your life and I think he might be right. I grew up through a pre-internet era of style and what the internet has given everybody is you don't have to have been there to experience it or be into it to know about it. It has made things far more accessible."

"The beauty of the '80s was that adidas was consistently popular whereas most other brands were discovered, worn and then discarded. In the late '80s, a lot of people who were into the casual thing got into acid house. From there, in the 90s here in the U.K. all these beat-driven genres like drum n bass, jungle, and UK garage were to some degree born out of that. Another thing that happened in the 90s was that things that were considered underground in the 80s were dragged into the mainstream. Before the '90s, it was only football fans and hip-hop kids wearing trainers, but in that decade they became standard issue to everyone."

"I feel doing what I do with Spezial requires an adidas sensibility, and the only way you're going to get that is by having loved, engaged and worn the brand. I believe that sensibility brings an instinct - I get distinctive gut feelings about what is adidas and what isn't adidas. I am an adidas purist - adidas is a broad church and what I do is just one element in the wider mix."

"I remember when we started Spezial, I put the proposal forward to adidas and I kept saying 'we need an Originals offering that is premium and archive inspired with a strong brand identity,' and they went 'ok, go off and do it then' which left me scratching my head about what 'strong brand identity' actually means for a brand like adidas. I started to think about my own identity, and how that was formulated from where I was born, how I grew up, and the experiences I had. I tried to take that same ideology and apply it to adidas - hence why much of my inspiration points for the range are European. You know, I was fortunate growing up, through my interest in music and clothes I often ended up in the right place at the right time - I was in the Hacienda in summer 1988, I was at Spike Island, I was at the Freestyle '85 Hip-Hop all-dayer in Covent Garden - I had some great experiences in my formative years."

"I remember interviewing one of the guys from Rock Steady Crew, Ken Swift, and I asked, 'in the early days of Hip Hop why did all the b-boys adopt adidas?' and he said, 'well to kids like us in the South Bronx, it was European and that was exotic to us,' and I thought wow that's how it was for us growing up in the north west of England. My relationship with adidas runs very deep. Before Spezial, I had worked with the brand as an employee for ten years and then a number of years following that as a consultant."

"Spezial is very UK-centric - it celebrates this strange relationship between these raw and colourful British youth cultures and their love of what was once this conservative, straight-laced, engineered German sportswear brand. I suppose it's about the meeting and the mix of those two things. When I proposed the Spezial range, I liked the idea of adidas celebrating itself - using itself as its primary reference point. When I put that original proposal together, I was thinking there are so many people in fashion and streetwear that use adidas as a reference, why isn't adidas referencing itself?"

"Yeah exactly. Some people frown upon the words heritage and retro, but it’s not either - it's recontextualising things. What I always say with what I do for adidas, is it's not about being retro or futuristic, it's about being modern, and that's what Spezial is. If what you create feels modern then that sets the agenda for the future."

"It's difficult to say. I've been asked this question many times and it's like when someone says to you, 'what's your favourite album,' and it just depends on what day you ask me on. Obviously, there are albums in there that I'm going to play more frequently, but with my footwear collection, it's almost like the diary of my career. I wasn't a collector originally - I was just keeping things for posterity."

"The first time we did an exhibition for Spezial was in 2013, and I didn't realise that I had accrued nearly the amount of the shoes that I had. When I started working for adidas I was working on entertainment promotions, so it was my job to build relationships. The thing about that job was that back then the only people adidas paid were athletes, so the only currency we had to work with was product and relationships. Because of this, I employed a lot of my ideas from the '90s with sourcing deadstock within my job. I'd say to the adidas salesforce, 'hey, do you know any small independent sports shops that have got old stock?'. From there, they would link me with these sports stores, and I'd go there and say, 'I believe you have a load of old stock in your basement, do you want to swap it for new stuff?' and they would be thrilled! I would then use the old shoes as collateral alongside new releases. Now I look back and think ‘oh god, the amount of amazing vintage shoes I sourced and gave away’.”

"I don't really wear my vintage shoes very much nowadays because I'm preserving them. There is less need to, as the reissues are so much better than they were twenty years ago - the specifications on the uppers and the sole units are so much more accurate. When these shoes first started being reissued, they weren't paying the same attention to detail that we do nowadays with them. It's funny when people say 'oh the vintage shoes were so much better-made!' You want to come to look in my archive, half of them are covered in glue marks!"

"I mean, the thing about it is, there's a difference between the subculture that surrounds football and a fashion/menswear trend that attempts to reference it. Trends are transient, and trends by their very nature are subject to change. People can try and adopt a look but you can't truly adopt a culture. A subculture is so much more than a trend - it's immersive and is essentially a way of life for many. While the look of that subculture might evolve and change, the ideology and mentality that underpins it will remain. That doesn't come from what brands a person buys into."

"The whole subculture that surrounds football is not solely about the brands that people wear, it's also about the way in which they wear them and how they put things together. Again it goes back to the idea of recontextualising. It might just be the way that a person fastens the top button on their polo shirt, or has their shirt untucked out the back of their sweatshirt - it's just those little signifiers that can tell you so much. It could be the fit of the jeans or the way they carry themselves that gives them away. You might see that person who's gone and got the designer anorak and a pair of trainers, but you can tell from his hairstyle and the fit of his jeans that it isn't legitimate."

"I've seen it come and go before. The same thing happened around Britpop. You had people who were into Britpop who were taking style cues from underground subcultures and then wearing them without necessarily understanding just what the associations and connotations of what they had on."