Athleisure reached new heights on Wednesday night. Atop Manhattan’s famed observation deck The Edge some 1,300 feet in the air, a crowd gasped as four brave women, clad in Adidas’s new Originals Sport collection, performed a nail-biting aerial dance on the side of the skyscraper.
An original idea for the Originals event; it was unexpected, but made total sense. The sky dancing was the finale to a day of feteing the brand’s inaugural Sport collection, a line that empowers women to express personal style without compromising on performance. As exhibited by both the aerial act and a runway-like show incorporating pole artists, acrobats, and dancers—performance, clearly, was not sacrificed.
The female empowerment that is at the core of the collection went further than the 3-Stripe designs that decked out the room. It was felt in the essence of the evening, as friends of the brand mingled about the 100th floor of The Edge prior to the performance. “I signed with Adidas in 2022 when I first broke onto the track and field scene,” Olympian heptathlete Anna Hall told Vogue. “I remember being so excited because they also sponsored my idol [in the sport] Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Adidas had marketed the heptathlon before, and they really care about women’s sports. We’re both rooting for each other. Adidas likes to watch what I do on the track, and it’s so fun to watch what they’ve come up with and created.”
Hall donned the leotard from the new line, which fuses signature Originals styles with training-ready tech. And at the crux of the collection, of course, was the 3-Stripes design. According to singer-songwriter Coco Jones, who was wearing the new track jacket: “If you had the 3-stripes, [growing up] you were that girl.” She added, “I remember me in high school, trying to be all cool with my athleisure. That’s why I’m obsessed with Adidas Originals: It gives me nostalgia from coming of age, being this sporty girl who also loved music.”
True to the nature of the collection, the sporty girls were out, and they were putting their own personal spin on the new pieces. During the pre-performance cocktail hour, Camila Marrone clad in the new tank mingled near the displays of tracksuits and onesies. Ciara Miller, who paired her newsboy cap with the cover-up sweatshirt, was animatedly discussing how girls are cutting their Adidas leggings below the knee. “It’s a little capri, and it’s chic,” she said. Model Lori Harvey, on the other hand, is digging the retro resurgence: “Obviously I’m a vintage lover, so I feel like it’s cool to bring that back and integrate it in a way where you’re getting this old-school vibe that still feels fresh.”
Following the performance, the DJ continued to spin tracks that followed guests into the glass-walled banquet room from the observation deck. The awe of the female aerial artists’s feats intermingled with soundbites of 3-Stripe nostalgia, culminating in a real buzz.
Jones, who recently released a song called Body So Tea, employed her euphonious rhetoric to sum up the evening perfectly: “[My song] is all about empowerment and loving yourself. And just today, at this event, I saw so many killer women—I mean women were on the side of the building, like come on! It just reminds me of all of the ways that women conquer and dominate. It was just a very tea day.”
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Camila Morrone
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Ciara Miller
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Coco Jones
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Lori Harvey
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Sarah Jane Nader
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ELISE SWOPES
Anna Hall
