Y-3

Y-3 launched as a partnership between Yohji Yamamoto and Adidas in 2002, with the spring-summer 2003 collection serving as the first Y-3 show. The collaboration itself began a season earlier, when Yamamoto integrated adidas pieces into his Yohji Yamamoto fall-winter 2001 collection.

Yamamoto, working out of Tokyo and Paris, said he felt he had drifted too far from the street after about 15 years of designing for the Paris collections, and so he called Nike first, who declined, then turned to Adidas in Europe, who immediately said yes and invited him to their office, where he showed eight outfits.

The “Y” stands for Yamamoto, the “3” for Adidas’ three stripes, and from the start the line was framed as the first formal meeting of fashion-house design and sportswear infrastructure. The brand’s avant-garde aesthetic placed it ahead of its time, influencing the likes of Raf Simons and Rick Owens in their subsequent collaborations with Adidas.

Menswear sits at the center of Y-3’s output, drawn directly from Yamamoto’s own approach to dressing men. The three white stripes appear across everything from bomber jackets and men’s shirting to fluid skirts, all illustrating Yohji’s singular, asymmetric, draped silhouette, in a stark color spectrum of black, navy, and white.

Chunky three-stripe motifs and large logos stand out against classically based pieces such as blazers and trousers, and Yamamoto also mimics his signature pieces such as the Balloon Pants, recreating them with a sportswear-adjacent flair, while tracksuits also receive the Yohji treatment.

Footwear became the commercial spine of the menswear offer, and in 2008 Y-3 opened its first standalone store in NYC’s West Village, and the brand’s footwear maintained heavy demand globally, with earlier sneakers like the Honja Low and Tokio Trainer showing archival adidas influences before the 2013 release of the Qasa.

Y-3  helped kick start the athleisure phenomenon that has since become the norm today. The subdivision of Adidas continues to invent and reinvent under Yamamoto’s guidance, marking 20 years in 2022, contributing innovative concepts like the Gendo, designing the Japan national football team kits for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Today, Y-3 dresses a customer who wants Yamamoto’s volume and proportion translated into clothes that work on the street, sitting between Adidas’ mainline product and the designer’s runway collection, and operating as the longest-running model for how a fashion house and a sportswear company can share a label.