How can one of footwear’s most timeless icons live a new life?
For Slam Jam and adidas Originals, it begins with a shift in perspective: looking at the Stan Smith not as a fixed symbol, but as a familiar object still capable of being reimagined, distorted, and rediscovered.
Few shoes in the world carry the name of the athlete who made them iconic. The Stan Smith is one of the longest-standing examples: a silhouette that has moved far beyond sport and lifestyle to become a global landmark, a design staple, and a cross-generational totem of style.
On June 5th, Slam Jam imagines a new era for the Stan Smith by pushing its most recognizable design codes to the extreme. Created in collaboration with design duo Soft Baroque, the installation ‘New Heritage’ transforms Spazio Maiocchi into a surreal garden of sculptural oddities and optical shifts. Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin create furniture and objects that treat familiar domestic forms as unstable material, questioning how function and image can coexist within a single object. Their work occupies the space between functional design and conceptual experimentation, using material ambiguity and unexpected elements to unsettle conventional ways of seeing and understanding objects.
The experience starts from a simple yet radical exercise: observing the DNA of the Stan Smith, then shuffling it like a crystal snow globe. Familiar codes get displaced, magnified, and reassembled into an unexpected landscape, where heritage becomes elastic and the classic begins to behave strangely again.
The result is an immersive environment, with Danish platform label 20_14’s symphonic explorations drifting through the space like a siren call.
If you’re wearing your old Stan Smiths, you might leave seeing them with different eyes.
Exhibition handout and printed text on view for the show at Spazio Maiocchi, Milan.
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