Forget Kanye. In This Short Film, Adidas Gives Us Icelandic Magic
Pretty much everything we hear about Adidas lately relates to its canceled relationship with Kanye. We're tired of that story, and it's a relief to have a new one.
Adidas Spezial—a heritage brand—has released a meditative film featuring sportswear titan Stephen Graham. Over the course of four minutes, Graham wears seven of the new Spezial footwear styles, as well as apparel. But the real star of the show is Iceland.
As Graham meanders the Icelandic Fjords, the country's ethereal magic weaves it spell amid conversations with Friðrik Þór Friðriksson and Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, who directed and composed the soundtrack, respectively.
"All our mythology and our tales come from our surroundings,” Hilmarsson says at one point. The film offers so many eyefuls of scenic splendor that you might forget Adidas shoes and clothes are also on display.
We're not sorry about that. The vast quiet of this place—where fairies still merit respect, roads built around their stones—takes us out of consumerism's noisy insistence that what we truly need, for fulfillment, must be pursued with cash. Graham presses his hands into moss. We learn how ravens convey secrets to Odin.
We weren't expecting such a meditative exploration to follow the din of conflict around Yeezys. But this also told us that, like people, brands have other sides to them, other concerns. Maybe brands also long for quiet after a storm.
