Stan Smith won Wimbledon in 1972,
and six years later adidas decided his name
belonged on a plain white tennis shoe so minimal it barely seemed
designed at all, just leather, a green heel tab, and a row of
perforated stripes standing in for the brand’s usual raised ones.
That restraint has kept the shoe in constant circulation for nearly
fifty years. Now adidas is asking it to do something it was never
built for, point its toes. The Stan Smith Lo Ballet Shoes
swap the laces for a pair of soft straps, landing one of sneaker
history’s most stubbornly plain designs squarely inside the
ballet-flat renaissance that has spent the past few seasons taking
over everyone’s shoe rotation.
Adidas Stan Smith Lo Ballet
Shoes, $ 100
The ballet flat’s own
pedigree goes back to 1947, when Rose Repetto
first cut a pair of soft leather slippers for her son, the dancer
and choreographer Roland Petit, before Brigitte Bardot and Audrey
Hepburn carried the silhouette off the stage and onto the street
for good. Balletcore’s current chapter properly ignited with Miu
Miu’s viral fall 2022 show, and the trend has only gathered speed
since, with satin ballet shoes, velvet Mary Janes, and
rhinestone-studded mesh flats turning up on runway after runway.
What’s changed most recently is the addition of an athletic accent,
the so-called sneakerina, a hybrid built to give the ballet flat’s
elegance the actual support of a trainer. Adidas has already been
testing that lane with its Samba Janes, and the Stan Smith Lo
Ballet Shoes read as the logical next chapter, proof the whole
category has graduated from niche experiment to permanent
fixture.
Adidas Stan Smith Lo Ballet
Shoes, $ 100
Adidas kept just enough of the original DNA to
make the joke land. The perforated 3-Stripes are still there,
running along a shoe built from soft, premium leather instead of
the usual canvas-and-rubber combination. The laces are gone
entirely, replaced by a hook-and-loop strap across the vamp that
gives the whole silhouette its Mary Jane cast, while the low-cut,
open construction keeps the ankle exposed the way a proper ballet
flat would. It comes in the house’s two most predictable colorways,
a clean Core Black and a
Cloud White that leans even closer to the
original design, both priced at $100. Reviewers describe the fit as
generous, running large enough that sizing down half a step is the
general consensus, which tracks for a shoe engineered to feel like
a flat despite the rubber sole doing the actual work underneath. It
is, in other words, exactly the kind of quiet reinvention the
Stan Smith has built a five-decade career on, changing
everything about its job while keeping its face reassuringly the
same.