Stan Smith "OG"

The Stan Smith sits at an unusual intersection of tennis history and sneaker culture, having started life under a different name entirely. adidas originally produced the shoe as the Haillet, named for French tennis player Robert Haillet, before renaming it in association with American player Stan Smith around 1971. Smith had risen to prominence on the tennis circuit, and adidas attached his name and face, literally, to the shoe, printing his portrait on the tongue tab in a move that would become one of the most recognizable branding details in athletic footwear history.

The OG colorway is as restrained as sneakers get: a clean white leather upper with a perforated three-stripe detail along the lateral and medial sides, rendered not as the typical raised stripes but as rows of small holes pressed into the leather. The heel tab and tongue branding appear in green, the one real color note in an otherwise all-white construction. That combination of full-grain leather, minimal stitching, and low-profile cupsole gave the shoe a cleanliness that made it adaptable far beyond the baseline.

What happened over the following decades confirmed the design’s staying power. The Stan Smith crossed from tennis courts into broader sportswear adoption, then into fashion circles, accumulating collaborations and reissues across multiple generations without the core silhouette requiring significant alteration. The original construction decisions, particularly the flat perforated stripe and the smooth leather surface, gave later designers and collaborators a genuinely blank canvas. The 1971 naming moment is effectively the point of origin for one of the longest-running and most widely reproduced silhouettes in adidas history.