Kerwin Frost, Adidas' Weirdo Superstar, Is Going Huge

Kerwin Frost is painting his room. He is not a painter by trade, but he’s here, roller in hand, stretching thick strips of blue higher and higher up the walls. Soon, they will close the gap between the last patches of white and a cheddar-colored corner above.

Painting isn’t his profession, but the 26-year-old Frost is a certain kind of young person that doesn’t really have a discernible profession. There isn’t exactly a job title that suits him.

Frost wears a pencil tattoo on his face and impossible, exaggerated clothes with sleeves big enough to hold more than a few tricks. His closest parallel might be Willy Wonka. He is often on the verge of a wheezing fit of laughter that catches up to itself in a half a second and immediately offers more. Fear of God designer Jerry Lorenzo, a guest on Frost’s talk show, has compared him to Oprah.

Hailing from Harlem, he made a name for himself downtown by running around Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood in the 2010s and participating in whatever mischief and hustle the streetwear scene in that zone could provide. With his old crew, the Spaghetti Boys, he designed T-shirts in collaboration with Off-White. He’s long been courted by brands eager to stand adjacent to New York kids who provide a cool they can’t muster in-house. He DJed the Kardashian-Jenner-West Christmas party in 2018, but only after trolling a good portion of its A-list attendees on camera. He held film festivals in 2019 and 2021. Frost does pretty much everything, but right now he is painting his room.

The cerulean he’s rolling over the white with, as he redoes the walls, almost matches the pantone on his tracksuit. A chroma key could send his head floating anywhere, and the combo nearly blends him into the background. He says it wasn’t intentional and it’s believable: blending in is not something Kerwin Frost is interested in.

“I want to embrace my fucking weirdness,” he says. “I want to own that.”

In his first sportswear collaboration, a collection of sneakers and apparel with Adidas, he is bear hugging it. Frost is full-on walking into an encounter with his weirdness to extend to it a firm handshake and then pretzeling up with it in a game of Twister. The project is an exercise in shape, proportion, and boundary.

His debut design is the Adidas Superstuffed, a jumbo take on the classic Superstar silhouette that releases on Aug. 26 for $250 exclusively on Adidas’ Confirmed app. Frost has described it as a clown shoe for the masses. The sneaker preserves the original makeup of the Superstar and seriously enlarges it, offering a model that appears five sizes bigger than its actual size. Copious padding on the inside keeps the shoe from being roomy despite it being gigantic. In a promotional video for the Superstuffed, a towering Frost in a Yeti tracksuit comes through like Snoop crushing buildings, stomping his sneakers across city streets while citizens scream below and helicopters circle overhead. In some images, his torso is buffed out by a blue bodysuit that looks like it was borrowed from The Tick. It only gets stranger from there.

Frost has also previewed an anthropomorphic update to the Adidas Forum that has blue eyes jutting off its eyestays, long blond hair hanging off its collar, and wide Cheshire teeth wrapping its toe. He calls this shoe, which is expected to release later this year for $250, the Human Chive. (There’s also a Forum Low for $180 coming.) He doesn’t attempt to make too much sense of the name, arguing that most sneaker names don’t make sense anyway.

“I just made it up,” Frost says.

Frost is not overly serious, but he is also not joking. It would be easy to misinterpret his whole thing as a bit were he not so earnest—about his inspirations, about the things that bring him joy, about the things he wants to do.

His work with Adidas is bizarre and could have only come from him, but does have a clear precedent. The easiest reference point for Kerwin Frost x Adidas is Jeremy Scott x Adidas, a collaboration that began in 2003. In that partnership, Scott’s ornamental additions (tiger tails, wings, and teddy bear heads) to archival sneakers pushed the limits of how ostentatious sports footwear could be.

The Frost designs emerge from a similar rabbit hole. They look like hallucinations, something a sentient Jeremy Scott sneaker would imagine were it capable of thought. They could be a fever dream, or even a nightmare for sneakerhead traditionalists not keen on seeing heritage models so mutated. Frost has the inclination to push back on the conservative end of this spectrum, and says he’s experienced it via the handful of half-brothers he has in the sneaker industry.

But there is still a shred of the traditional in his approach. Save for the sizing, the Superstuffed does keep the original Superstar intact, after all. And Frost’s appreciation of the bulky Forum, twisted though his take on it is, is informed by his upbringing in New York. That sturdiness in its DNA has an appeal to his own.

Here, on hiatus from painting his room and speaking over Zoom, the designer discusses how he made one of Adidas’ biggest sneakers ever even bigger, how he got the brand to put a waterfall of hair on the back of another of its most important models, and what these steps mean for the future of sneakers. The conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

The most obvious reference point for some of these sneakers is the Jeremy Scott x Adidas stuff. How into that line were you, when all that was at its peak?

When I think of Jeremy, he’s just kind of a Yoda, my Yoda. And so his Adidas collection almost got me into fashion completely. Higher-end brands weren’t that known as they are now. Now, like, Fivio Foreign and everybody knows about Bottega Veneta and all the other brands, but back then, it wasn’t that. And even if it was, it would be, like, Monclers—like, hood dudes would be into Monclers and shit.

So Jeremy’s collection for sure, I think, just opened my eyes, like, “Oh, I can see myself in this. This is something that it completely speaks to my soul.” But I’ve studied his work over the years. And also just on a personal tip, the kind of friendship we have, he’s very aware of his position in my life as that person.

Do you ever stop and think about that—how he was somebody you looked up to back then, and now he’s a person you can just reach out to?

I don’t know. Because more than other people, I think I get to interact with my icons really, really early. And it always seems serendipitous. It never seems like that’s what I’m going for. But I’ve had that pleasure with so many people.

Jeremy is that person to me, but I think in this line it was kind of what made Adidas special to me. And rather than going in there like, “How out of the box can we go?” I was more like, “What were the things that jumped out at me the most?” And that’s, like, Missy Elliott’s Respect M.E. collection. The impact that Run DMC had and that uniformness that they brought. And they were very—not mascoty, they were a symbol of Adidas, fully. And I’m all into that as well. I’ve always been super into marketing and just mascots and people who represented a whole brand with this one thing.

So then with the Superstuffed, it was like, I want to make mascot sneakers, you know what I mean? But I also want to reverse it and give homage [to] something that did mean a lot to streetwear in general. I always try to just tie it back to history. Getting to pay dues and interact with the people I’ve have so far in my life has just been mind-blowing.

To some extent, I want it to be uniform for the people it’s meant for. I think there’s still an audience of people who just need it. And just need something that says that but isn’t $5,000 at fucking Dover Street Market. You know what I mean? People should just have this. It should just exist.

And it’s kind of the same thing you’re mentioning with Jeremy Scott in terms of having something that can be a gateway for people where it’s like, they don’t have to go buy the super-expensive things—they have something that’s more accessible.

No, no. And that was this connection for the people. And that took a life of its own. And it was the first telltale of that. People were able to get these boutique shoes at Adidas. That was what it became.

Did these ideas for what a shoe could look like for you form all the way back then? Were you trying to make your own shoes before you ever had an Adidas deal?

Oh, yeah, for sure. I had made a bespoke before with the other guys. [Laughs.] And I used to mess around with shoes all the time. I mean, me and my friends kind of like were at the forefront of the DIY thing. I think with everything, a lot of people just reference fashion, and it’s behind culture. But with me and everything I make, yeah, it is Jeremy Scott, but it’s also like Chicken Run and claymation and all different types of mediums that I think tie within just as well.

At what point did you arrive at this freaky Forum collaboration and the Superstuffed?

It was really fast. They would have these initial [conversations]: this is a year of this shoe. And with us, they were like, “You gotta make a Forum”. And I actually liked the Forums a lot, because I just love the structure of them. They’re just clunky. I’m from New York, I just like that.

That bulkiness and the heft to it, right?

Yeah, yeah. One hundred percent. Yeah, exactly. And then I was like, I don’t know, let’s change it up, but could you make crazy without crazy colors? It bends it on its head because people are normally just like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll just see flashy colors.” I think when I came up with this, it was just like, I just immediately saw it. And this was inspired by the wing technology [points to the ears on the shoe], by Jeremy’s wing technology, and this was inspired by Walter Van Beirendonck [points to the teeth]. So it was kind of like a morphed baby.

And I had brought it to Jeremy and I was like, “I know you would never.” Anyone who’s so distant on their tastes never wants to be put next to a name. But I’m just like, those guys just paved my vision of fashion and that was for them.

I saw a funny response from Frank Cooke, who used to work at Jordan Brand, on Instagram, and he posted the shoes and he basically said, after seeing this, he doesn’t ever want to see a footwear developer tell him something is impossible to do on a shoe, because you’ve created this shoe with Adidas that looks like it would be impossible to make. How much back and forth did you have to do in terms of production? Because I imagine a brand sees this and they say this is a nightmare in some ways in actually trying to make it real.

Damn, that’s really nice of Frank to say that.

Yeah, basically that you had pushed a boundary to like, look, now nobody can say that you can’t do this because look at what Kerwin did.

That’s cool. That’s sick. That makes me happy off top because I know Frank is a very serious sneakerhead. So I remember when Jeremys were coming out, it was just, the majority of people just hated it and didn’t see that part of it. And it was just, all the sneaker dudes were just like, “No, fuck this shit. This is some weirdo shit.” They were just angry. It’s really funny to see now that twine of, people now kind of understand that it would then make it easier for the next person to do something crazy at an early start. The development for them, they were really accepting of me.

I think the whole deal itself is super unique, because if you look at kids who came out of SoHo or that era, none of those people really ended up with a serious sneaker deal, especially at Adidas. And the only other person I could think that wasn’t even in SoHo: Sean Wotherspoon, with his collab, he ended up getting his off a contest and kind of just flipped it and made it his own world, which was amazing. But no one had really come from, like, “Oh, you’re not an athlete or a musician, an actor, or a model or anything.” But [Adidas] were really accepting from the beginning.

One of the first things I did was get rid of any other sneaker brand that I had, and then just completely dove into the history of Adidas and how much I could thread together. Like, all right, well, this is what makes it really sick for me. How can I push their visions forward? How can I present that? But they were really open with a lot of ideas. They would be like, “Are you, are you sure?”

Because I can imagine the situation in which you show them these shoes and they’re like, “What are you talking about? We can’t do that.”

I think they just got it and they were ready for that change. But I think I’ve also learned that not a lot of people go in with that mentality and have this full force. This is exactly how I want to do it. And we’re very detailed with everything.

So I guess it sounds more plausible when you hear it from my mouth and I sound really passionate about it. So they didn’t really see it as a joke. They were just like, “Oh, shit. OK.” And then there was even a point where I was like, it’s like I helped them get over this hump of doing it, because I think, deeper in the design process, they would try to cross-pitch me these insane ideas to make the shoe actually like a morphed image that you can’t tell what it is. They kind of took my crazy and tried to make it 10 times crazier for me. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I want everybody to be able to wear this. Yes, this is for the weirdo, but I also want everyday people to just be able to put it on and feel a little sneaky when they’re jumping into it. Because it’s not super loud in colors and stuff, but it is really crazy and out of the box.

You mentioned on Instagram that your intention is to create art pieces that can be put on display in a museum, but you still do want this to be something that people can really wear?

That, too, yeah. There’s option A and option B. It’s like, in one reality, you’re actually buying them and then you sneak them on. But I can only imagine that being a lot of fun for anybody who does that, just an adrenaline rush, pulling those off or figuring out how to wear it. But on the contrary, if you’re really conservative about your style, you definitely can put this Superstuffed on a bookcase. I do look at every single piece and I’m just like, I don’t know, would this be able to stand alone on a podium or in one of those old Sneaker Freaker magazines or something?

It’s funny, too, because, I think you mentioned it earlier, sneaker people have a tendency to be precious or be very serious. Like, you can’t do this to this shoe.

“Wait, no. What’s going on? I wouldn’t even wear it.” [Laughs.]

But people have to push these things forward and you have to convince [them] sometimes.

I don’t know why it’s still in question. That is surprising to me. I mean, I obviously knew it would be a tearing moment where people would be freaking out, but it’s surprising to know on a specific point that we’re not past that. And we’re not like, “Oh, wait,” because so many people have already proved it wrong, you know what I mean? Already, before me—I’m not the first.

I mean, I even think of Virgil Abloh and his Off-White x Nike stuff.

I was just about to say that.

I talked to somebody who designed one of those shoes and they were telling me how, when they presented those shoes at the factory in Asia, people at the factory were confused because they were saying, “What, you want this shoe to look like this? This looks like it’s messed up.”

Yeah, you have to deconstruct a fucking shoe.

“This can’t be right. This isn’t right.” But it kind of created a new way of thinking about it.

One hundred percent.

How much apparel is coming out with this, too? Because that’s some of the most bonkers stuff to me from the photo shoot, the Yeti suit or the alien costume. Is any of that stuff coming to retail?

The Yeti is, but the alien suit isn’t. But, I think there’s about, like, 15 to 20 looks, and I had designed it as one collection. Also, basically, everything that’s coming out, they were all my first ideas coming in the door, and there was this pause in COVID, and it pushed production. But I still feel just as proud of them. It’s interesting—you have to submit your ideas, and then you can make small touches and arrangements to them, but you can’t ex them out or go to the next.

Did you ever get nervous, like, “I submitted the wrong idea”?

No, no. But obviously, as someone who’s looking at the details, you’re like, “Wait, no. I could’ve just tied it to this one if I just did this or if I just cleaned this corner.” I’m very much—I live with the idea for a while.

It’s kind of the Kanye West thing of, with a music project, with an album, you can continue to tweak it and just upload it that last minute. But apparel and footwear production takes all these resources.

All of it means a lot to me, also, because I also want to appease my predecessors. You know what I mean? I want to make sure I follow that legacy right. And getting the co-sign at such an early rate, it’s like, I have big shoes to fill, no pun intended.

And it’s like, I can’t fuck this up for anybody who’s next. It’ll be referred to this moment when they gave this type of chance to someone like me.

Who were some of those predecessors, and what are some of the reactions you’ve seen from them?

Oh, like I said earlier, just, like, Jeremy, DMC, Missy Elliott. It keeps going. John Mayer, Mac DeMarco.

How have you felt about some of the public reactions? I assume you’ve seen when the shoes go up on Instagram and everybody has a reaction. You can’t not have a reaction to this project.

I love it. I like it. I’m here for both sides. I think if you’re not making something that—it has to either really piss people off or be the most genius thing to someone. But if it’s in the middle, you kind of fail. It’s just like, what was the point? There’s enough people doing things, you know what I mean? It has to stand for something. So I’m happy for that. And I think more people will come around as time goes on, too. And I’m hopeful for that.

Are you scrolling through those comments? Are you reading them?

Yeah, for sure. And it’s funny with the hair shoes, I haven’t seen a joke that was good enough. And I remember when I got the pencil tattooed on my face and one of the things I was thinking about before I got it permanently on, I was like, “OK, stop for a second and just really kind of try to think of any insult that can come to you, in third person.”

It’s like naming a baby and you think about every name that your kid could get made fun of for.

Yeah. And I was literally like, “Oh, what can they say?” And none of them really suck. I mean, you can call me a pencil face. It’s not funny enough for more than a chuckle. And then with these, homie can get—nah, I’m just joking. But with these, you can say, “Oh, horseshoe.” It wasn’t inspired by a horse, but you could say those things. And they’re not that funny.

That would be good. That would be funny, too. I don’t know, you can do that, but with that, what I’m saying is that it’s not bad enough for people to actually think of anything that really sticks. So they’re fine. I’m not really that offended. I’ve seen, “This is a waste of an Adidas collab. How could they do this?” And that’s cool, I don’t know. I’d rather have that. If I had full acceptance, something would be off.

I know you mentioned on Instagram, too, that a lot of people expect you to just design a colorway. To me, for your intentions, that would have been the waste, to have this opportunity and to only change the color.

No, I could never live with myself. It would have been heartbreaking. I like colorways. There definitely could have been a reality where that’s all I got and I would have been grateful for it. But it’s like, that’s what they were expecting. Luckily, it’s more.

Have you worn the shoes out in public at all?

The Superstuffed, I’ve worn them a lot.

And can people tell when they see the shoes on your feet that it’s gigantic?

Normally I’m in situations where people normally see me don’t. Everyone’s used to it with me. I’m not surprising anyone if I’m wearing it.

Where do you want people to wear these shoes? What do you want people to do in these shoes?

I don’t know. Bella Hadid wore the Superstuffeds, and she wore them correctly. Well, the way I wanted to see it. Because it’s like she was slim and the pants were a little baggy and straight leg, but it was enough to make the proportion kind of be poofed on the bottom and flow, I really liked that. There’s ways to wear it that’s not, like—you won’t look crazy.

Do you think about that when you make stuff? Because once you give it to the brand and once the consumer buys it, it’s out of your hands, but are you inclined to give them instructions—like, “This should look like this”—or do you think they can just do whatever they want?

If someone asks me. But I really, really am just surprised that anyone would be wearing what I’m making. I’m just like, “That’s cool. Thank you so much for seeing what I see.” Because that’s just cool—you’re with the shits.

Especially if it’s DMC.

No, that was crazy. I have not taken any of that stuff in. John Mayer called [and], for 10 minutes, ranted, about the Superstuffed. And I was just frozen after. I couldn’t say a word. The conversation was over. I was just, “I can’t talk to you right now.”

Were you expecting him to do a video and everything like that?

Hell no. No. All of this stuff just really feels crazy to me, but it’s also, I’m very prepared and confident. I definitely have anxiety. I’m just like, “Oh, shit. All right. Well, this is real. We’re really doing this.” It’s like, you’ve been sitting with these ideas for two years, caved in. It was like, “Oh, this is going into the world. [Laughs.] It’s really happening. This isn’t a mock-up anymore.”

When does the anxiety go away?

No, it never does. It’s the same with my everyday life. It was like, I was telling everyone, “Oh my God, after the film festival, we’ll be settled in. We’ll be good.” And it was immediately Adidas time after that. I think you go like, “Oh, man, that’s going to be at the end.” You know what I mean? At the end, there’s something you can’t control, especially as a dad.

It’s like you trick yourself into being like, “Oh, eventually I’m going to rest.” But the reason why you make these things is because you’re not interested in resting. You’re interested in making things.

You shouldn’t with these opportunities. You super shouldn’t.