Sneaker of the week: Pharrell is digging through adidas’ archive again

Afika Jadezweni

If the sneaker industry’s current obsession is turning yesterday’s deep cuts into tomorrow’s grails, Pharrell has picked a particularly deep cut to play next.

The new sneaker drop is increasingly starting to look like a reunion tour. We have seen the Samba, Gazelle, SL 72 and Speedcat return to the cultural conversation, and the current crop of hype releases often comes with a reference to something that already had a life before Instagram made sneakers a spectator sport. Now Pharrell Williams is going deeper into the adidas archive with the VIRGINIA Watermoc, reworking the Adventure Water Moc from the early 2000s.

But if sneaker culture is obsessed with resurrecting the past, who gets to decide which forgotten shoe deserves a second act? Pharrell is a particularly persuasive answer. His relationship with adidas began in 2014, when the first NMD Human Race releases helped turn a collaboration between a musician and a sportswear brand into something closer to a cultural design partnership. A decade later, Pharrell has moved comfortably between music, streetwear, jewellery, art and luxury fashion, and his appointment as Louis Vuitton’s menswear creative director only made official what his career had already demonstrated: that he’s a multihyphenate with an eye for what’s next.

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This is perhaps what piqued our interest in Pharell’s take on the adidas Watermoc.

While the original was built for getting wet; the new version keeps the neoprene and mesh upper, bungee lacing, reflective webbing and lugged rubber sole, but those practical components have been rearranged into a much more graphic silhouette.

In Blue, Yellow and Black, it looks less like something waiting beside a kayak and more like the kind of obscure adidas model that sneaker obsessives would have been hunting down on sneaker forums before the kicks caught street fever appeal again.

The funny thing about sneaker history is that the shoes once considered too weird, too technical or simply too uncool to bother with can eventually become the ones everyone wants. Fashion has always had a weakness for the overlooked child, and sneaker culture has taken that instinct to resale-platform levels.

The VIRGINIA line has already pulled from adidas’ less obvious corners, with the Vario Flat Earther revisiting the 2004 Yoga Vario. The Watermoc goes further into the weeds, and that is where it gets interesting.

The answer is sitting on a chunky rubber sole. The Watermoc has the visual awkwardness that makes a shoe memorable: a low, almost sock-like upper, a web of straps across the foot, and a sole built with considerably more attitude than the top half seems to require.

That also makes it more fun to style. Pairing it with technical outerwear is the obvious move, but obvious is rarely the most interesting. With shorts, the water-shoe reference becomes part of the joke; with tailoring, it becomes something altogether more deliberate.

The VIRGINIA Watermoc launched on 5 September in Blue, Yellow and Black for R2799 at Adidas and selected retailers. 

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