PARIS — On June 26 and 27, 2026, adidas Originals opened a two-day creative residency with TTGT Studio inside a multi-floor Parisian home, gathering friends and collaborators around a single, deceptively simple premise: the Stan Smith as a canvas. Across painting, film, photography, skateboarding, and live music — with Yung Lean, James Blake, Mark Gonzales, Cyprien Gaillard, Ibeyi, Thibaut Grevet, Debbie, Guillermo Santomà, and Mathilde Vallantin Dulac among the contributors — the residency examined why a utilitarian object of understated design has held its cultural status for decades.
The argument the residency makes is a curatorial one. The Stan Smith has endured, adidas suggests, not as a statement piece but because it offers a blank cultural space onto which its wearer projects — a natural uniform for designers and creators, oriented toward the quiet discipline of making rather than visibility. Each floor of the house tested that idea in a different medium.
Yung Lean’s Live Painting and Cyprien Gaillard’s Film: The Artists in Residence
Courtesy of adidas Originals.
Courtesy of adidas Originals.
At the top of the house, Yung Lean turned the highest room into a site of live spray painting — a stripped-back setup of the artist, a ladder, and his tools, set against a soundtrack of minimalist classical composition. The display was not the finished work but the creative act itself, the painterly gesture reduced to its most direct and intense form. It is a fitting register for a Stockholm figure whose influence, more than a decade on, reads as both visible and atmospheric.
Cyprien Gaillard — whose work across film, video, and installation traces how landscapes and monuments carry time — presented Untitled, a film in which thick white smoke emerges slowly from the mouth of a railroad tunnel, gradually obscuring the surrounding landscape. Through a single intervention, a familiar site becomes a space of mystery and instability, the landscape revealed as something constantly changing.
Photographer Thibaut Grevet, following his books BLUR and BALLET, offered an exclusive preview of FAR, his upcoming monograph — three prints extending his use of zoom and motion — and converted a dedicated photo room into a working studio, making portraits of each participating artist not as performers or icons but as individuals.
James Blake, Ibeyi, and Debbie: Music Reduced to the Essential
James Blake. Courtesy of adidas Originals.
The residency’s musical program pursued the same economy of means. James Blake, performing in the round with an ensemble of two musicians, explored the relationship between the artist and the utilitarian objects used to make music, moving through renditions of songs old and new with the audience surrounding him.
Paris-raised twin duo Ibeyi — daughters of Cuban percussionist Miguel “Angá” Díaz and French-Venezuelan singer Valérie Díaz — performed with only themselves and a grand piano, foregrounding what sits at the origin of their practice: voice, percussion, rhythm, and instinct. And South East London soul artist Debbie built a sanctuary of sound, presenting bespoke vocal compositions created for the space, accompanied by a twelve-person gospel choir moving amid the audience, dissolving the line between performers and visitors.
Mark Gonzales, Guillermo Santomà, and the Utilitarian Object
Ibeyi. Courtesy of adidas Originals.
Courtesy of adidas Originals.
Mark Gonzales — the godfather of modern street skateboarding — occupied a residency studio with members of the adidas Skate team, the space becoming an exploration of the two forces that have defined his career: skateboarding and art. The framing was pointed: like the Stan Smith, the skateboard is a simple object, used with purpose, sitting at the center of an enduring legacy.
That sensibility ran through the architecture of the Stan Smith residency itself. Guillermo Santomà, whose practice moves between architecture, design, and contemporary art, installed a lounge of conversation and respite built on functional construction rather than ornament — an inquiry into how simple materials acquire meaning through use. At the entrance, set designer Mathilde Vallantin Dulac curated a selection of utilitarian green objects, inviting visitors to consider the sneaker through the same lens as these functional forms — each one leaving with guests as a souvenir.
From the Herzogenaurach Archive to Unreleased Iterations
Courtesy of adidas Originals.
The residency closed on history. An archival exhibition, transported from the adidas archive in Herzogenaurach, honored the shoe’s legacy through a display of its past — while a curated selection of iterations not yet released to the public projected its relevance forward. It was the residency’s thesis stated as an object lesson: a sneaker, a uniform, an immediately recognizable form — and still, after all these decades, a canvas.
The adidas Originals Stan Smith residency with TTGT Studio took place June 26–27, 2026, in Paris.
