Run DMC’s influence on Adidas' popularity in the 1980s.

Sport met fashion and music in 1986 when hip hop group Run DMC recorded its devotion to street wear on the track “My Adidas”. Sweatshirts, track pants and trainers were appropriated by a generation of men and women who threw away the laces and decorated themselves with heavy weight gold jewellery. In the 1970s, Adidas trainers had been an anti-establishment fashion statement worn with jeans, but in the defiant, label aware 1980s branding took over and an unsuspecting sportswear company found itself at the heart of a fashion movement.

Tracksuits became popular as leisure wear and jog pants would become a general trend in the decades that followed. In the 1936 Olympics, Jesse Owens, a black American runner, won four gold medals wearing a pair of trainers made by cobbler Adi Dassler (Adidas) and his brother, Rudolph. They had seen a gap in the market for high performance athletic shoes in 1920 and they started to build what was to become a label as important to street fashion as it was to sport. Ensembles featuring the colors of Africa (green, yellow and red) became wildly popular among African Americans, and so did the kente clothmainly woven in Ghana and Ivory Coast.

EXTRACTS FROM THE FASHION BOOK PHAIDON