Dover Street Market x adidas Stan Smith 'Triple Black'
Colorway: Black/Black/Black · Style code: FX1155 · Release date: April 9, 2020 · Price: $719 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Dover Street Market x adidas Stan Smith 'White' (FX1152) · Dover Street Market x adidas Samba 'Black White' (IH4979) · Brain Dead x Dover Street Market x adidas Bowling 'Black' (JP9838)
Rei Kawakubo's Dover Street Market has a habit of removing things, and this Stan Smith is the clearest example on the model. The upper is black leather with black laces and a black cupsole, listed as Black/Black/Black, and every element that usually identifies the shoe has been taken off. There are no rows of punched holes where the stripes would sit, and the tongue label carries no sketched Stan Smith. Branding survives only at the heel: the DSM hut mark in white on the left tab, the adidas Trefoil on the right. Without those two stamps it could pass for an unbranded court shoe.
The tonal black pair arrived on April 9, 2020, at $170, alongside a matching all-white version built the same way. It was not DSM's first Stan Smith: in September 2014 the store joined two other boutiques for a joint minimalist white edition with each shop's logo embossed on the tongue. The 2020 pair goes further by moving the logo off the tongue entirely and leaving the leather blank. For a shoe that passed 100 million pairs sold around 2019, an all-black version with nothing on the side is a genuinely different object.