Stan Smith won Wimbledon in 1972, and six years later adidas decided his name belonged on a plain white tennis shoe so minimal it barely seemed designed at all, just leather, a green heel tab, and a row of perforated stripes standing in for the brand’s usual raised ones. That restraint has kept the shoe in constant circulation for nearly fifty years. Now adidas is asking it to do something it was never built for, point its toes. The Stan Smith Lo Ballet Shoes swap the laces for a pair of soft straps, landing one of sneaker history’s most stubbornly plain designs squarely inside the ballet-flat renaissance that has spent the past few seasons taking over everyone’s shoe rotation.
Ballet Flats Never Really Left
Adidas Stan Smith Lo Ballet Shoes, $ 100
The ballet flat’s own pedigree goes back to 1947, when Rose Repetto first cut a pair of soft leather slippers for her son, the dancer and choreographer Roland Petit, before Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn carried the silhouette off the stage and onto the street for good. Balletcore’s current chapter properly ignited with Miu Miu’s viral fall 2022 show, and the trend has only gathered speed since, with satin ballet shoes, velvet Mary Janes, and rhinestone-studded mesh flats turning up on runway after runway. What’s changed most recently is the addition of an athletic accent, the so-called sneakerina, a hybrid built to give the ballet flat’s elegance the actual support of a trainer. Adidas has already been testing that lane with its Samba Janes, and the Stan Smith Lo Ballet Shoes read as the logical next chapter, proof the whole category has graduated from niche experiment to permanent fixture.
The Details That Make It Work
Adidas Stan Smith Lo Ballet Shoes, $ 100
Adidas kept just enough of the original DNA to make the joke land. The perforated 3-Stripes are still there, running along a shoe built from soft, premium leather instead of the usual canvas-and-rubber combination. The laces are gone entirely, replaced by a hook-and-loop strap across the vamp that gives the whole silhouette its Mary Jane cast, while the low-cut, open construction keeps the ankle exposed the way a proper ballet flat would. It comes in the house’s two most predictable colorways, a clean Core Black and a Cloud White that leans even closer to the original design, both priced at $100. Reviewers describe the fit as generous, running large enough that sizing down half a step is the general consensus, which tracks for a shoe engineered to feel like a flat despite the rubber sole doing the actual work underneath. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of quiet reinvention the Stan Smith has built a five-decade career on, changing everything about its job while keeping its face reassuringly the same.
