Run-DMC and Adidas - How a Song About Sneakers Rewrote the Rules

What “My Adidas” actually was

“My Adidas” is a song, but it is also the moment hip hop stopped waiting to be marketed to and started doing the marketing itself. Run-DMC released it in 1986 as the first single from their album Raising Hell, written by Joseph “Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and produced with Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons. On the surface it is three minutes of loyalty to a shoe. Underneath, it is a group naming what already belonged to their world and daring a company to notice.

Adidas noticed. What followed became the template every sneaker and streetwear collaboration since has copied in one way or another: a brand paying an artist not to wear a product, but to be seen as having always worn it.

Where it came from

To understand why this mattered, you need the shoe itself first. Adidas introduced the Superstar around 1969 as a low top version of its Pro Model basketball shoe, built with a leather upper and a rubber toe cap that gave the design its “shell toe” nickname. It was made for basketball courts, and it found real traction there through the early 1970s, worn by NBA players who valued the toe protection and the non marking sole. By the time Run-DMC were teenagers in Hollis, Queens, the Superstar had already crossed from the court into everyday New York street style, alongside tracksuits, chains, and the flat brimmed hat looks the group would later make iconic in their own right.

The group’s relationship with the shoe was not invented for a marketing meeting. They wore Superstars because that is what people around them wore. The song came out of that reality rather than the other way around, which is part of why the deal that followed read as authentic rather than manufactured.

Then came the concert. In July 1986, Run-DMC played Madison Square Garden, and their co-manager Lyor Cohen invited an Adidas executive, Angelo Anastasio, to watch from the crowd. During the performance of “My Adidas,” the group asked the audience, tens of thousands of people, to hold their sneakers in the air. Anastasio reportedly watched a sea of Adidas shoes go up and understood, in that single moment, what the song had been telling him all along. Within months, Run-DMC and Adidas signed an endorsement deal reported at around 1.6 million dollars, widely credited as the first sneaker endorsement given to people outside of professional sport.

The elements that defined the look

A few pieces made the Run-DMC silhouette instantly recognizable, and each carried its own history.

The Superstars themselves, worn without laces. The most common account traces this to a look that started in prison, where laces are removed as a safety measure, and migrated out into street style before Run-DMC picked it up and put it on stage. Some retellings differ on the finer details of how directly it traveled, but the laceless shoe became the group’s signature regardless of the exact chain of custody.

Tracksuits and thick gold rope chains, worn less as jewelry in the traditional sense and more as a visible marker of having made it, a style borrowed from and shared with other Run DMC contemporaries in early Def Jam era hip hop.

Black fedora style hats and sharp, minimal color palettes, mostly black, white, and red, which is not a coincidence. It matched the Adidas Superstar’s own classic colorway and helped the group and the brand read as a single visual unit rather than an artist wearing a sponsor’s product.

What it became

The deal did more than put money in Run-DMC’s pockets. It proved that a music act’s audience was a real, biddable market, not a side effect of youth culture that brands could ignore. Within hip hop, it opened the door for artists to be paid for their taste rather than only their talent, a shift that runs in a direct line to every rapper owned or co owned sneaker line since, and to the broader normalization of musicians as brand faces rather than brand customers.

The Superstar itself kept cycling in and out of fashion relevance over the following decades, picked up by different scenes for different reasons, but it never fully lost the Run-DMC association. Adidas has returned to that history repeatedly, releasing laceless and Run-DMC branded Superstar editions as anniversary tributes rather than routine reissues, treating the moment as heritage rather than nostalgia marketing alone.

It is worth being precise about what the deal actually changed. It did not invent hip hop’s relationship with fashion, which existed well before 1986. What it did was formalize that relationship into a business arrangement, giving artists leverage and giving brands a reason to take street style seriously as a source of design direction rather than something to react to after the fact.

Common misconceptions

A frequent assumption is that Run-DMC designed the Superstar or that Adidas built the shoe for them. Neither is true. The shoe predates the group by more than a decade and was designed for basketball. What Run-DMC changed was the shoe’s cultural address, not its construction.

Another is that “My Adidas” was written as an advertisement. It was written first, as a statement of identity and loyalty from within the group’s own world, and the commercial relationship followed the song’s success rather than preceding it.

It is also worth separating the laceless look from a costume choice. For the people who originated it, going without laces carried real weight tied to incarceration and survival, not just style. Run-DMC’s adoption of it brought that history into mainstream visibility whether audiences at the time fully understood the reference or not.

FAQ

Did Run-DMC get paid to write “My Adidas”? No. The song came first, built on the group’s own relationship with the shoe. The endorsement deal was negotiated after Adidas saw the song’s impact, not before it.

Is the Adidas Superstar the same shoe from the 1986 deal? The core silhouette is largely unchanged since its 1969 to 1970 introduction, though materials and manufacturing have been updated over the decades. Adidas has released Run-DMC specific versions as tribute editions rather than as the standard retail shoe.

Why did Run-DMC wear their sneakers without laces? The style is most commonly traced to prison culture, where laces are removed for safety reasons, filtering into street fashion before the group adopted it as part of their look. Accounts vary on the exact route it took to reach them.