Gallery: Only Women Get to Wear Adidas' Wild New Shoe
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Adidas's newest shoe, the PureBoost X, launches today. It has a flexible, sock-like mesh upper, and a sole made of Adidas's foam Boost technology. It's also designed just for women.
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Adidas decided to focus in earnest on women's feet after spotting a trend. The athletics company sponsors a number of marathons, half-marathons, and shorter races like 5Ks. In recent years, the participation rate for those events has skewed more and more female—evidence that the marketplace for women runners is growing, globally.
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With that in mind, Adidas used motion-capture technology to analyze women's feet. They found that the female foot experiences a lot of expansion in the forefoot.
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To cater to that, this shoe has an unusual design detail: Where the upper and sole would normally fuse together around the arch, there’s open space.
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The floating arch functions like an extra-sturdy sock—when it’s not glued to the sole, the arch can move while still providing support. The result, Adidas says, is a design that accommodates the range of motion and expansion observed in the female foot.
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Traditionally, it’s the sole’s job to provide arch support. Here, Adidas’s designers have assigned that task to the upper.
