Occasionally a trend takes over London with such force that it feels like the city has signed one big, unofficial sponsorship deal. This summer, that deal is with Adidas, specifically with their traditional three-stripe garments, such as the Firebird shorts and track jackets, which seem to be glued to the skin of every fourth Londoner these days.
Three-stripes have become a second skin, and Adidas has once again won over London, just two years since the Adidas Samba was declared dead in the water.
Adidas Originals was the second-highest rising search term on ASOS last week, while Depop has seen a 153 per cent increase in searches for ‘Adidas shorts’ since January, and a 34 per cent increase in the last month alone.
The popular resale site has also seen a 162 per cent rise in searches for ‘Adidas Firebird’ since January and a 35 per cent increase in searches for ‘Adidas track jacket’ over the same period. This would help explain why half the capital seems to be dressed in the brand. But it’s not just London: In April, the German brand reported double-digit growth across all markets and channels in the first quarter of 2025, in what CEO Bjørn Gulden has described as “ a great quarter.”
Judging by the streets of London, Q2 is going to blow Bjørn’s socks off. “Adidas is having a really great time at the moment, and it tends to in the summertime,” an Adidas insider tells us. “It’s a way for people to still retain their ‘edge’ in summer.”
But this summer is different. There are undeniable cultural forces at play. Oasis have reunited, leading to the recirculation of endless nostalgic images of Liam and Noel Gallagher from the 1990s, often clad in Adidas track jackets and bottoms. Adidas isn’t one to let an opportunity pass it by: it capitalised on the cultural moment by releasing an Adidas Originals x Oasis capsule collaboration in June, ahead of the reunion tour kicking off in Cardiff this July.
The collection is 90s-inspired, with many items featuring the original, iconic black and white Oasis logo, designed in 1993 by Brian Cannon. The Oasis logo has changed a handful of times over the band’s tenure, but no iteration has had quite the same staying power as Cannon’s original.
With fashion trends now so heavily influenced by nostalgia, having numerous poster boys (and girls) for old trends can be vital to their revival. Oasis is only one piece of the pie. “Obviously the Robbie Williams at Glastonbury picture is a big one,” says Mark Knox, founder of Brit Cult, an Instagram page dedicated to cataloguing British pop culture from the 1990s and 2000s. Knox is referencing a 1995 picture of Robbie Williams at the festival.
The 21-year-old star, still a member of Take That at the time, was photographed sporting bleach blonde hair, a missing tooth and — the pièce de resistance — a bright red Firebird jacket. Coincidentally, this was right around the time when Williams started partying with Liam and Noel Gallagher, raising the eyebrows of music execs and boyband fans countrywide. Within a month of these photos being published, Williams had been kicked out of Take That. “Adidas was tied to rebellion when it came to Robbie,” Knox says. “It was part of his rebrand.”
Somehow, the 1995 image of Robbie and his Firebird feels more relevant than ever. It features on the cover of Williams’s new album, ironically named “Britpop”, and intrinsically links Williams to the Oasis crew. Meanwhile, Adidas collaborated with Glastonbury Festival to create an official festival football shirt for Glastonbury 2025.
Knox cites other notable poster people of Adidas days gone by: Kate Moss sat on a bed wearing Adidas Gazelles in 1993, Ewan McGregor pounding the pavement in his Adidas Sambas in 1996’s Trainspotting, and David Beckham’s first Adidas boot deal, also in 1996. “It was in music, it was in fashion, it was in sport, it was in everything,” Knox says. Now, everything that helped cement Adidas within the culture back then is being mined for nostalgia in 2025. In a strange meeting of worlds, David Beckham’s youngest son, Cruz, was spotted wearing the Oasis x Adidas Originals collection at Glastonbury. The snake is eating its tail.
Being able to fall back on this wealth of iconography has helped drive the Adidas boom, says Daniel-Yaw Miller, sports and fashion journalist and founder of the SportsVerse newsletter. “In the 2010s, Nike was on top with the whole hype sneaker, Jordans trend, and on top of basketball culture,” he recalls. “But now, trends such as blokecore, Britpop, Y2K and nostalgic football-inspired fashion are really coming to the forefront, and that puts Adidas in the driver's seat. Because Adidas is the original football sportswear brand.”
The brand’s connection to football, and by extension “blokecore” and other trends of that ilk, goes back as far as 1954, when Adidas introduced the first screw-in stud football boot during the Switzerland world cup. This revolutionised the beautiful game, allowing players to adjust their boots to different pitch conditions. From this moment on, Adidas and football were inextricably linked.
Miller is unsurprised by London’s Adidas takeover, partially because an Adidas boom is often preceded by a Nike slump. “The sports market is very cyclical,” he says. “When Nike is up, Adidas is down. When Adidas is up, Nike is usually in a transition period. And that's happened on five to six-year cycles over the past couple of decades.”
Nike’s current transition period can be somewhat attributed to their changeover in CEOs, with new CEO Elliot Hill signing on in October 2024. Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden, by comparison, has an extra year in the game and a wave of cultural capital on his side.
Although it’s not all as authentic as it seems. “They've put a s*** ton of money behind the marketing and we’re lapping it up,” says a fashion industry insider with links to Adidas.
Miller agrees. “There's no doubt that Adidas is spending so much money on marketing,” he says. “Adidas is in a great position right now, but they are doubling down to assert themselves and get a bit louder. Because Adidas has always gone a bit quieter with its marketing, maybe compared to Nike and others in that category [of brands].”
They both cite the recent Superstar campaign, which features Samuel L Jackson, Jennie Kim, Missy Elliot, Gabriette and Glorilla among others. In the black and white video advert, Jackson tells the camera: “Fashion changes, style returns.” It’s a big money move, but also a mark of Adidas’s star power – their ability to call upon A-listers like this and have them rep the brand.
This is what stylist Jay Hines says keeps Adidas at the “top of the food chain”. “Working with cultural figures across sports and all art forms keeps them relevant,” he says. “Having huge co-signs from artists such as Pusha T, Oasis, Beyoncé, and Pharrell solidifies their status as one of the greats.”
The Adidas chokehold over London summer is also the result of a continued connection between the brand and the city. One of the most popular London shoe trends of recent years is the result of a collaboration between Adidas and south London-born fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, who has been working with the brand since November 2020. She has designed a total of 25 trainers for Adidas, all of which have sold out almost immediately.
Most recently, Adidas launched “The London Collection” in anticipation of Wimbledon 2025, where the trefoil (little Adidas leaf) returned to players’ outfits for the first time in three decades. There’s also the new “London” Superstar trainer, set for release in October, which is inspired by the city’s 1970s punk scene. And that’s hardly its first footwear nod to the city: Adidas have had a shoe named after our fair capital, the Adidas London, since the 1970s. The brand has also collaborated with Transport for London on numerous occasions, most notably in 2018, when it released a series of trainers inspired by London Tube lines with roundels on the back of each heel.
But if everyone in London is already wearing something, doesn’t that mean the trend is about to die? Yes, says Morgan Allan, editor-in-chief of Twos Mag and art director at Versus. “The uptick in three stripes being worn by the [London] population actually probably started last summer,” he notes, “with the post Samba-boom, Wales Bonner, Adi football making a comeback. Back then the cool kids were wearing Adi, but now it feels super embedded.”
Allan predicts another brand will soon become king, namely Puma, who he notes “are very much at the forefront of London youth fashion.”
“Two years ago, it was uncool to wear Puma,” he says. “But they’ve followed the Adi model, dipped into their archive, brought out all these running trainers and given a pair to every cool kid in the city. Now everyone’s wearing Puma.” Indeed, the Puma Speedcat has been spotted on the soles of Rihanna, Emily Ratajkowski and Dua Lipa, to name just a few.
The great Adidas clothing boom of 2025 is indeed very reminiscent of what happened with the Adidas Samba. Oversaturation and an unfortunate cameo on the feet of Rishi Sunak forced many to abandon the ‘Shoe of the Moment’ and search elsewhere. But Adidas was prepared. “If you look at like how long the Samba was actually around, that's a very long shelf life for a sneaker to be popular,” Miller says.
“Adidas did a really good job strategically of positioning other shoe lines and offering them as alternatives to the Samba. The Gazelle, the Spezial, the SL72, and now the Superstar, which is going to be the next big push that Adidas puts out to the market.”
Following that pattern, all it takes is one undesirable character to don an Adidas Firebird tracksuit, and London’s big Adidas summer will be dead. For all of one month. Knowing Adidas, there’s probably a wealth of other options on the back burner, hot and ready to go.
