The Adidas Superstar turns 56 this year. In that time, it has been worn by Run-DMC, adopted by skate culture, remixed by Pharrell, Kerwin Frost and Bad Bunny, and reissued in more colourways than anyone has properly counted. In all of that, no African skate community has ever designed one. On July 23, 2026, that changed. waf. (Wafflesncream) - the Lagos Island collective that has been building Nigeria's skate scene from the ground up for fourteen years  - becomes the first.

The collaboration is the Superstar ADV, Adidas Originals' skate-specific silhouette, and every design decision in it comes from one specific place. Not Lagos broadly. Lagos Island - the industrial waterfront, the sky that turns pink near the sea at certain hours, the heat that every skater on the island knows intimately. The upper is a dusty grey drawn from the island's landscape. The outsole is a translucent pink that references that particular sky. The side panels are breathable, built not for aesthetics but for the actual conditions the shoe will be skated in. "We didn't want to make a shoe that looked like Lagos," waf. co-founder Jomi Marcus-Bello said. "We wanted to make a shoe that felt like skating in Lagos - the heat, the texture, the light at certain times of day near the water."

The Superstar ADV is not a Lagos-themed shoe. It is a Lagos shoe - designed by people who have been skating these streets for over a decade, who built their headquarters, The Spot, on Lagos Island, and who have spent fourteen years creating a skate culture in Nigeria without institutional backing or global recognition. waf. started in 2011 as a skate crew founded by Jomi Marcus-Bello and Seun Nubi. It grew into something larger - a creative collective spanning skateboarding, music, art, fashion and community, a place where artists, musicians and designers move alongside skaters, all of them connected by a shared relationship to Lagos Island.

The campaign reflects the same logic as the shoe. Shot entirely on Lagos Island, it features waf. community members - the skaters, the creatives, the people who actually built the scene - rather than imported faces or global ambassadors. "waf. didn't just design a shoe," said Estee Erasmus, Adidas Director of Category Management EM South. "They told a story about a place and a community that global skate culture has never properly seen."

The Adidas Superstar is one of the most collaborated-on shoes in sneaker history. The list of designers, artists and communities who have put their stamp on it spans decades and continents. Africa, despite producing some of the world's most compelling skate communities and creative collectives, has never been part of that conversation - until now. In more than fifty years of the Superstar, waf. is the first African skate community to hold the pen. The shoe is available for presale today, July 23, with a limited drop at Adidas Lekki, Lagos. The global release follows October 12, 2026.

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