An ad, a model, and how Adidas became undone

 

FMT:

An ad, a model, and how

Adidas became undone

Adzhar Ibrahim

-08 Aug 2024, 07:30 AM

A knee-jerk reaction to advertisements featuring a pro-Palestinian model prompted a knee-jerk reaction by the shoe company.

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When I was in secondary school back in the early seventies, we boys were just as keen on fashion as any teen today. But in those pre-internet days, fashion cycles lasted longer and arrived at our shores much later. Everybody was generally much poorer, too, so our fashions and styles were often modified to suit our shallow pockets, and of course our weather.

At one time, what passed for fashion, at least in my school, were shirts made from the coarse cotton fabric of flour sacks. Yes, flour sacks, something I may have problems explaining to today’s younger people who may never have even seen a flour sack.

Those were the days of the hippies – the flower-children of the Vietnam-war era when the young Baby Boomers were rejecting a lot of what their parents stood for, including old-school sartorial standards as well as capitalism, the American Dream, and not to mention soap and shampoo and visits to the barber shop too.

I couldn’t quite boast about my own contributions to that era’s fashion but I did take part in the flour-sacks garments fad, as such sacks were available cheaply at Bok Cheng’s sundry shop near my kampung house.

But I knew even then what was the ultimate in cool clothes – white t-shirts worn with faded, or 

seasoned

 blue jeans and blue sneakers with white stripes.

White T-shirts were easy: my father’s old Pagoda undershirts worked well enough, and he never realised he lost a few. The faded blue jeans were supposed to be a pair of Levi’s but most of us got by with a pair of cheaper Saddle Kings jeans instead. And the blue sneakers with white stripes? That, however, must be a pair of Adidas.

I don’t think I’ve got over the idea of this style that passed for cool back then. But I don’t take part any more, partly because when you’re overweight and balding you can’t quite get away with the rebel-without-a-cause look, and partly because that hippie style has become very expensive.

The last time I did anything about it was many years ago when I used to go to the US regularly on business. I remember buying a pair of Levi’s 501 button fly red-tab original denim jeans that were 

guaranteed to fade, shrink and wrinkle

 such that you had to buy a few sizes bigger to account for the 

guaranteed

 shrinkage.

A pair then cost US$17, which at RM2.50 to the dollar then, was very affordable, even for a skinflint like me. The last pair I bought I immediately wore into the sea back home and let it dry off on my body. That was the 

hack

 to mould the jeans to your torso. That didn’t quite work for me though, or for anybody else if you’re just skin and bones and attitude.

I don’t buy such jeans any more; some marketing whiz decided such humble garments are actually 

classics

 that should be sold at exorbitant prices in premium stores, and not at the supermarket discount bins where I had bought them. Plus I’m now of a size where it’s almost impossible to buy anything a few sizes bigger.

The blue sneakers with white stripes? I recently discovered they were the SL72 models, a classic from the era, also then worn by the original Starsky of the Starsky and Hutch TV cop series. I bought a few pairs over the years, back when sneakers were purely functional and were not priced only for the wealthy or for drug dealers.

This particular model came into notoriety recently when Adidas, the original manufacturer, brought it out again with great fanfare to celebrate 50 years of its existence, which coincides with the current Olympics in Paris.

Adidas put out a huge marketing campaign, using some of the coolest celebrities in entertainment, fashion and social media, most of whose names are just a blur to me. One name though is quite well-known, both in fashion circles and also in contemporary social news – the supermodel Bella Hadid, a Palestinian American.

A number of Jewish groups became greatly offended with the Adidas marketing campaign using Hadid. The retro-inspired SL72 shoes were first released for the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The groups claimed it was unacceptable to associate her – a fierce advocate of Palestinian freedom and statehood – with the Munich Olympics, where a Palestinian militant group kidnapped a number of Israeli Olympics participants, all of whom died in the ensuing rescue operations shootout.

That rather knee-jerk accusation was immediately followed by a similar knee-jerk reaction by Adidas, which suspended the ad campaign and apologised to the offended groups for the 

unintentional

 connection to Munich 1972.

It is astonishing, to say the least, to blame somebody like Hadid, and by extension Adidas, of the gross 

crime

 of glorifying the death of the Israeli athletes – regardless of whether there is a connection or not – unless you claim that Munich 1972, like the Holocaust of the Second World War, is a pure Jewish-only memory that cannot be co-opted or used by anybody else.

Hadid had never said anything at all about the Munich tragedy, and later put out a statement to say she didn’t even know of the incident which happened way before she was born.

The reaction against Adidas was swift, with calls for boycotts coming quick and fast, and the business impact of lost sales beginning to be felt almost immediately. Adidas, perhaps also out of fear of the rumoured legal actions Hadid was planning, then came out to apologise to Hadid and the others involved in the campaign.

But the damage was done. This farcical turn of events has tainted Adidas, perhaps forever, especially among those who support Palestine in the current conflict with Israel, even if conflict is too tame a word perhaps for what many, Jews and non-Jews alike, are already calling a modern-day genocide.

While some other companies also face boycotts – with some of the biggest consumer names in the world posting reduced revenues and profits directly attributable to such boycotts – you can make the case that some companies are perhaps just unlucky to be singled out, and are just roadkill or, as locals colourfully put it, suffered a frog’s death.

Some other companies though, for reasons ranging from being clueless to spineless, are perhaps more deserving of such fates. So, on top of reasons such as overpriced products and my own ballooning physique, I certainly have other reasons to be critical of such companies.

Especially those that are prone to putting their foot in their mouth, which is a troubling condition to suffer from when you are a maker of shoes.