Y-3: The Hyphen That Changed Everything.

Fashion loves a “collaboration” these days. Every week, another mashup drops - luxury houses slumming it with sneaker brands, heritage labels cosying up to streetwear, fast fashion playing dress-up with artists. But rewind to October 2002, Paris. Yohji Yamamoto walked out with Adidas. And suddenly, “collab” meant something else entirely.

The name said it all: Y for Yohji, 3 for Adidas’s stripes, and the hyphen - humble punctuation, elevated into symbol - signifying the unlikely, seismic union of avant-garde design and athletic performance. This wasn’t co-branding. This was world-building. Yohji called it “clothing for movement,” and Adidas called it the future. Together, they set the template for a model that has since fuelled the global fashion economy.

When your gym kit accidentally stumbles into an art gallery and refuses to leave.

Why did it work? Context is everything. Yohji Yamamoto wasn’t just another designer; he was the man who stormed Paris in 1981 with volumes of black fabric, asymmetric cuts, and unfinished hems that scandalised critics and liberated a generation. While the West worshipped glamour, Yohji offered armor. His clothes weren’t about seduction but survival - serious, protective, deeply human. He once said, “I want to protect the woman who wears my clothes.” That ethos - fierce, uncompromising - became the soul of Y-3.

Adidas, meanwhile, had been cultivating its own mythology. Its three stripes were already shorthand for global cool, worn by athletes, ravers, and Run-DMC alike. But in the early 2000s, the brand was hunting for something beyond sports endorsements - something cultural. Enter Yamamoto, who brought not just design credibility but an intellectual heft. He transformed stripes into something architectural, anti-logo, almost monastic. Suddenly, Adidas wasn’t just about the gym - it was about the gallery.

And the product? Sneakers like the Qasa, the Kaiwa, and later the Raito Racer became cult icons. The Qasa in particular was a design UFO when it dropped in 2013: wrapped neoprene, tubular sole, ninja-like futurism. For many, it’s still theshoe that proved sneakers could be sculpture. Meanwhile, the apparel - draped jerseys, tech-nylon trench coats, billowing pants - looked equally at home on a Paris runway or at Berghain at 5 a.m.

Cheekily, Yohji has admitted he actually phoned Nike first. They said no. Adidas said yes. History said thank you. Imagine: a single boardroom shrug redirected the future of fashion.

Two decades on, Y-3 feels less like a “collaboration” than a discipline unto itself. While other designer-sports hook-ups chase hype and resale markets, Y-3 has cultivated a slow-burn cult - one that prizes ideas over novelty, discipline over gimmick. The collections still lean on Yohji’s beloved black, the shapes still whisper “samurai futurism,” and the ethos remains defiantly unswayed by TikTok cycles.

What makes it enduring is the tension. Yohji has always claimed to hate logos, yet Y-3 made Adidas’s stripes iconic in an entirely new register. He disdains nostalgia, yet Y-3 has created some of the most collectible sneakers of the century. He refuses to chase trends, yet his Adidas partnership defined one. The contradiction is the point.

If today’s endless carousel of collabs feels like empty noise, Y-3 is the reminder that the format can still mean something radical. In 2002, Yamamoto and Adidas didn’t just make clothes - they built an alternate present. A hyphen did what the industry didn’t think possible: made sport intellectual, made fashion practical, and made both into a movement.

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Words by AW.

PHotos courtesy of Y-3.