Three-stripe thrills
 
The visual history of Adidas
 
It all began in his mother's washroom in the quiet German town of Herzogenaurach more than 100 years ago. There, Adolf Dassler, known to everyone as "Adi", and his brother Rudolf made their first pair of sports shoes. After hundreds of innovative designs, epic moments and countless celebrity collaborations, this book presents a visual history of adidas footwear through nearly 200 models.

To develop his products and better adapt them to athletes' specific needs, Dassler asked them to return their worn-out shoes when they no longer needed them, accumulating the footwear in his attic. Athletes still return shoes to adidas, often as a gesture of thanks after winning a title or breaking a world record. This collection now forms the adidas Historical Archive, one of the largest, if not the largest, of any sporting-goods manufacturer worldwide, which photographers Christian Habermeier and Sebastian Jäger have spent years documenting in great detail.

Using the most sophisticated reproduction techniques, these images reveal subtle details such as stains, tears, fragments of repair tape, grass marks and faded autographs. Everything is here, captured at extremely high resolution and without retouching to reveal each wearer's personal story. We see the shoes worn by West Germany's football team in their "miraculous" 1954 World Cup victory and those Kathrine Switzer wore when she ran the Boston Marathon in 1967, before women could officially participate; customised models for major stars, from Madonna to Lionel Messi; collaborations with artists such as Pharrell Williams, Raf Simons, Stella McCartney and Yohji Yamamoto; and the brand's pioneering techniques and materials.
 
About the photographers and authors
 
Christian Habermeier has worked as a photographer and designer since 1989. He studied communication design and taught photography and digital illustration from 2000 to 2006. He has undertaken projects in Cuba, Kenya, Nepal, India, Switzerland and Hong Kong, among other places. In 2000 he founded studio waldeck photographers, fulfilling his dream of creating a CO2-neutral studio.
 
Sebastian Jäger studied design at Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg, where he met former lecturer Christian Habermeier in 2005. Their studio, waldeck photographers, serves clients in industry and the cultural sector. Since 2011, they have been visually documenting the adidas historical archives.