Willy Chavarria Adidas Megaride: The radical designer transforms adidas’s chunky ’90s silhouette into a skeletal high-top that rewrites what heritage athletic can be.
Willy Chavarria has never been one to respect a sneaker’s original assignment. His Fall/Winter 2026 collaboration with adidas takes the Megaride, that chunkily proportioned nineties running shoe, and extends it upward into a new high-top boot format that strips the silhouette down to its most skeletal bones. The result is something that feels less like a reissue and more like an act of architectural deconstruction, a shoe that admits its own framework rather than hiding it.
The Megaride itself was never subtle. Born in the late ’90s when maximalism and visible tech were fashion law, the shoe’s thick platform and aggressive tooling made it a statement piece in its first life. Chavarria’s intervention doesn’t soften that impulse. Instead, he exaggerates the structural elements that make the Megaride read as such a specific artifact of its moment: the aggressive lines, the chunky midsole geometry, the almost architectural relationship between upper and sole. The high-top iteration adds canvas or textile uppers that reference technical outdoor wear more than basketball courts, reinforcing a stripped-back, almost industrial aesthetic that aligns with the designer’s broader creative language around deconstruction and rawness.
What distinguishes this collaboration from typical heritage restomps is Chavarria’s refusal to sand down the shoe’s original aggression. The ‘Bones’ tooling mentioned in the collection’s DNA, a reference to the visible, skeletal midsole structure, becomes a central design element rather than something to be toned down for modern sensibilities. This is a designer who built his fashion reputation on making utility and structure visible, on treating seams and construction as design statements rather than hidden mechanics. Applied to adidas’s old-school running vocabulary, that philosophy produces something that reads neither nostalgic nor fully contemporary, but instead exists in a strange and intentional in-between space where ’90s grit and conceptual rigor meet.
What distinguishes this Willy Chavarria x adidas Megaride collaboration from typical heritage restomps is the designer’s refusal to sand down the shoe’s original aggression. The ‘Bones’ tooling, a reference to the visible, skeletal midsole structure, becomes a central design element rather than something to be toned down for modern sensibilities. This is a designer who built his fashion reputation on making utility and structure visible, on treating seams and construction as design statements rather than hidden mechanics. Applied to adidas’s old-school runner, that philosophy transforms a nineties silhouette into something raw, uncompromising, and unmistakably contemporary.
