How Stan Smith Became Hip Hop’s Most Unlikely Icon
“I think every community embraced that shoe: hustlers, drug dealers,” Pharrell Williams says near the beginning of the new documentary Who Is Stan Smith?, about the legendary tennis star whose Adidas sneaker bearing his name (and face) became a cultural touchstone across three generations and counting. “If we’re gonna be real, we’re gonna be real.”
As a kid growing up in the late-1970s, Stan Smith’s were the shoe to have. Stylish, cool and, best of all, affordable, they’d quickly grown in popularity far beyond anything Adidas had envisioned in the early-70s, when they signed Smith, who along with his friend Arthur Ashe dominated professional tennis at the time, to a deal for a branded shoe.
This was long before the era of Air Jordan’s, of course, when Adidas, Nike and Puma were duking it out for preeminence in the newly burgeoning athletic wear market. And while Nike and Puma had an undeniable cool factor on both the playing field and school playground, it was Stan Smith’s that would explode in popular culture.