adidas: Life After YEEZY
The brutal, bloody and blunt ending of YEEZY means that adidas will need to reposition itself and do so quickly. From an aesthetic standpoint, the line’s releases read like a “greatest hits” album: the above-mentioned YEEZY BOOST 750, the YEEZY BOOST 350 and YEEZY BOOST 350 V2, the YEEZY BOOST 700, the YEEZY FOAM RUNNER and YEEZY SLIDE plus a small army of other sneakers and boots. New Design DialectSince the earliest days of the YEEZY line, adidas footwear has drawn inspiration from and parallels to the YEEZY team’s creations. In an interesting twist, adidas stated in the press release announcing the end of the YEEZY partnership that they’re the “sole owner of all design rights to existing [YEEZY] products and new colorways under the [terms of] the partnership.”Legal trademark documents shared by Sneaker Legal show that adidas holds the patents to the YEEZY BOOST 750, YEEZY BOOST 350, YEEZY BOOST 350 V2, YEEZY BOOST 700 V2, YEEZY 700 V3, and the as-yet-unreleased YEEZY 1050, meaning that they could hypothetically continue to release the models without any signoff from Ye, while Ye himself only holds the patent to a single design of note — the YEEZY Slide. However, Bloomberg has reported that adidas plans to continue releasing YEEZY models sans embellishment and without YEEZY in the name.
3 months ago
Hypebeast
