Last weekend, Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, — American hero, Vogue cover model, and diamond-studded grill aficionado — stepped out in the Olympic Village wearing an eye-catching pair of shoes. This not a surprise. The guy is an unabashed sneakerhead of the highest order. “I think I have about, a total of 130 pairs of shoes,” Lochte told the New York Times. “So you can say I like shoes.”
So, what kicks did he bring out the other day? Perhaps he went with Air Yeezy IIs, as they are perhaps the footwear obsessive’s pair of of choice? But no – he went with a star-spangled, red, white, and blue pair of the new sneakers from designer Jeremy Scott and Adidas.
Scott’s style is gleefully over-the-top, with all sorts of appendages tacked on shoulders and bursts of fuschias and pinks. Adidas seems to have not held him back in the least bit. Some are high-tops that don’t really diverge too much from your standard Adidas kicks. Others are replete with clashing neons and feature wings that trail off the back. One shoe has a gorilla head popping out of the top. The rapper 2 Chainz is a fan.
A collection like this can’t be released without an ad campaign that’s correspondingly insane. So, Scott recruited Nicki Minaj, the rapper Big Sean, Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose, and the celebrated K-pop group 2NE1 to star in a globetrotting TV spot for the shoes. It jumps from Paris to Tokyo to Chicago to Rio to Nolita, where Minaj is walking out of La Esquina and into an impromptu fashion show on Kenmare Street. The singer Sky Ferreira — who’s a fixture at Scott’s runway shows — also shows up in an unexplained cameo.
The whole thing is loud, fun, and perfectly representative of Scott’s approach to fashion. Next time, though, he should enlist a different cast of characters: Ryan Lochte and his pile of Olympic medals.
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