Adidas

On August 18, 1949, Adi Dassler registered the Adolf Dassler adidas Sportschuhfabrik and set to work with 47 employees in the small town of Herzogenaurach, and in the same year he registered the shoe that featured the soon-to-become-famous three stripes.

Dassler had been making sports shoes with his older brother Rudolf since 1924 under Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik, the partnership that ended in 1948 when the brothers split and Rudolf went on to found Puma.

The proposition was narrow at the start, sports shoes engineered for athletes, developed by a founder who met with competitors, listened to their feedback, and adjusted the product accordingly.

Dassler was an innovator in sports shoe design and one of the early promoters who obtained endorsements from athletes to drive sales of his products. That reputation, equipment maker to the world’s track and football athletes, defined how the brand was understood for its first three decades.

Menswear at Adidas grew out of the footwear business and remains tied to it. The design language sits on a small set of garments, the three-stripe track jacket and matching pant, the football jersey, the Samba, Gazelle, and Superstar in leather and suede.

One early success was the Superstar sneaker, that started its life as a technical basketball shoe in 1969; the Superstar crossed over into street fashion and its status was confirmed when US hip hop group Run DMC started to wear adidas as part of their signature look, immortalized in their 1986 song “My Adidas”.

The apparel side widened through designer partnerships that placed the brand alongside fashion houses rather than only sportswear competitors. Launched in 2002, Y-3 is the result of a collaboration between adidas and Yohji Yamamoto, combining the German brand’s technical precision with Yamamoto’s conceptual, dark, and architectural approach.

The Wales Bonner line, run with the London designer who was recently named the new menswear creative director at Hermès, where she will present her first collection in January 2027, extends the same logic into tailored blousons, tracksuits, and knit jerseys.

As a credential, the 1954 World Cup win by West Germany in Adi Dassler’s screw-in stud boots gave the company its first global recognition, with the lightweight adidas boots giving the West Germans a decisive advantage over the heavier conventional boots worn by the Hungarians on a rain-soaked pitch in Bern.

Ownership and direction shifted after the founder’s death. Horst and his wife Käthe took over management after Adolf Dassler’s death in 1978; Käthe died in 1984, Horst in 1987, and Adidas was transformed into a private limited company in 1989, remaining family property until its IPO in 1995. Since then, the company has run as a listed business, headquartered in the same Bavarian town where it started.

Adidas AG is a German multinational athletic apparel and footwear corporation headquartered in Herzogenaurach, the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second largest in the world after Nike, with 2024 revenue listed at €23.68 billion.

In menswear today, Adidas dresses footballers, runners, and the fashion audience that buys Sambas and Gazelles for everyday wear, sitting in the mass market on its core lines and in the designer market through Y-3, Wales Bonner, and similar partnerships. The legacy is a small vocabulary of garments, three stripes, trefoil, track top, indoor football shoe, that has stayed legible across seventy-five years of changing ownership and changing customers.