Lagos Skate Crew waf. Takes adidas Superstar ADV Global

On October 12, 2026, Lagos skate crew waf. takes adidas Superstar ADV global, becoming the first African skate community to shape the iconic silhouette since its debut in 1970. The worldwide release followed a limited drop at adidas's Lagos flagship in Lekki, and the shoe now retails for 110 dollars on the brand's website and at select retailers worldwide.

Every detail of the shoe reads like a portrait of home. The upper arrives in a dusty grey drawn from the industrial landscape of Lagos Island, while breathable side panels were engineered to handle the city's punishing heat. A translucent pink outsole captures the hue of the horizon over the water at dusk, so every push across the pavement carries a quiet tribute to the skyline the skaters grew up beneath.

Underneath the Lagos detailing sits a platform built for boarding. The ADV edition of the shell-toe first arrived in 2015 with upgrades shaped by the demands of modern skateboarding, and the West African crew has now given that chassis its most personal rework yet.

From the Pavement to the World Stage

The collaboration caps a long, deliberate build. waf., short for Wafflesncream, was co-founded in 2012 by brothers Jomi Marcus-Bello and Nifemi Marcus-Bello alongside KC Obijiaku, and the trio has spent a decade and a half growing the Lagos skate scene from the ground up. In 2017 the collective staged Nigeria's first Go Skate Day, now one of the country's biggest annual skate festivals, and in 2024 it opened a skatepark at Freedom Park — a venue raised on the site of a former colonial prison.

"This shoe carries fourteen years of our community, and it carries our sky," Marcus-Bello said of the finished design. Estee Erasmus, Director Category Management EM South at adidas, said the project reflects the brand's commitment to amplifying the communities shaping culture — working alongside local scenes rather than simply licensing a heritage name.

Why This Moment Matters

In the silhouette's 55-year story, no African skate community had ever left its mark on the shoe, and that first reframes who gets to author the next chapter of a global classic. For adidas Originals, the Lagos release is the latest expression of a broader approach to partnerships: building with scenes that already have their own momentum instead of borrowing credibility from them. The fact that the Lagos skate crew waf. takes adidas Superstar ADV global also closes a loop — a silhouette born on the basketball court and adopted by hip-hop, now rewritten by African skaters.

For the teenagers pushing boards in Lagos today, the meaning lands closer to home. A kid who learned to ollie on Nigerian concrete can now lace up a shoe the whole world is buying — one designed by the same crew that taught the scene to skate. Representation in streetwear is often reduced to a colorway; this one carries more than a decade of pavement, teaching, and community inside a single pair.

Doors at the waf. flagship opened at nine in the morning, Lagos time, on launch day, and pairs are now available there and across adidas's retail and e-commerce platforms worldwide, according to Hypebae, which calls the project adidas's first collaboration with a Nigerian brand. BellaNaija, a media partner for the release, reports that the launch takes Lagos skate culture to the global stage — a step the collective has been building toward since its first sessions more than a decade ago.

The design was not a studio exercise handed down from abroad. Marie Claire Nigeria reports that the collective translated the textures and colours of Lagos directly into the shoe, treating the dusty grey, the heat-ready panels, and the dusk-horizon outsole as readings of the island the skaters call home.

For readers outside Nigeria, the drop is also an invitation. The waf. story shows what happens when skaters build their own infrastructure instead of waiting for it: the collective combined a retail space with a creative community, ran festivals, and turned a former prison site into a park. Now its name sits on one of the most recognizable sneakers on the planet — proof that a scene's center of gravity can shift, one push at a time. It is the same DIY logic behind projects like Nike SB handing its city pack to local skate shops and rideable skateboards built from classic trading cards: culture travels furthest when the people living it shape the object.