When Adidas called, Frost spotted a chance to prove himself as a legitimate creative. So the guy with a pencil tattooed on his face took the opportunity seriously. How seriously? “I
threw away all my Nikes,” Frost says. “I really wanted to completely consume Adidas.” He began assembling a massive mood board of all the places where Adidas intersected with cultural touchpoints from his childhood. “What are the things that speak to me the most with Adidas?” Frost asked. “For me that was the Beastie Boys, Missy Elliott's Respect Me collection, Jeremy Scott, of course.” And then there were the men who made the Superstar cool: “The Run DMC energy, that was the funkiness,” Frost says. “That wasn't supposed to be there.”
None of this meant that the Adidas team was going to automatically sign off on a 5x-sized Superstar. When Frost pitched his Michelin-man sneaker idea to an Adidas design team, he admits he received mostly blank stares. “It was like, ‘All right, you want to make this stuff? Tell us why it's important, tell us why it ties to the brand.’”
As Frost explained to the design team, he was inspired by something in Adidas’s own backyards. Outside the Adidas offices in Portland and Berlin, the brand has two enormous Superstar sculptures. In the Superstuffed, he wasn’t blowing up the Superstar so much as he was shrinking those Claes Oldenberg-scale sculptures down to wearable size. “I had an answer for everything,” Frost says, including why they should make denim shorts with Adidas piping down the sides: because they made similar jeans in a 2004 Y-3 collection.
Now, the collaboration is going even further down the rabbit hole of Frost’s bizarro mind. On November 17, he and Adidas are releasing a line of clothes that includes a sweatsuit covered in what looks like yeti fur, those denim jorts, as well as two new sneakers that might prove to be as polarizing as the Superstuffed. The first, the Humanchive, is essentially a Forum Hi with a human face sticking out of it. Frost says it’s an homage to his idols Jeremy Scott and Walter Van Bierendonck, while his fans have pointed out a resemblance to Ariana Grande. (The friends & family version will come with a lustrous wig.) The second is the Benchmark, which is essentially a baby shoe for grownups: it’s covered in cartoon characters meant to evoke the somewhat creepy animal mascots that adorn daycares in the projects where he grew up.