adidas Originals Forum SQ Goes Full Metal in “Metallic Silver/Core Black”

A dress-shoe sil gets a hard, mirrored finish for its next women’s rel.

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• A Basketball Shoe Built for the Olympics
• Cubism Reworks the Classic
• Inside the Metallic Silver Colorway
• Where the Forum SQ Fits Now
• Release

Few shoes carry as much structure history as the adidas Forum. The sil as conceived in 1983 by French designer Jacques Chassaing, who spent months interviewing professional players before landing on the shoe’s signature feature: a criss-cross strap system built to stabilize the ankle under the stress of jumping and cutting. The Forum debuted the following year, timed to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and it carried a then-unheard-of retail price of about $100. That cost alone made it a status object as much as a show shoe, and a young Michael Jordan famously wore a pair during the 1984 Team USA Olympic trials, months before his own signature line existed.

Chassaing built the shoe around what became known as the criss-cross ankle system, a strap arrangement inspired by the tape and rubber bands physiotherapists used to brace players’ ankles courtside. Rather than bury that support inside the shoe’s construction, Chassaing put it on the outside, visible, so the innovation read as clearly on the shoe as it functioned on the foot. That decision is why the Forum still looks structurally distinct from other basketball retros of its era: the strap isn’t decoration, it’s the shoe’s whole engineering argument made visible.

What started as a high-stability basketball shoe eventually drifted off the court entirely. Its heavy, structured build and glossy leather uppers found a second life in hip-hop and street style through the late 1980s and 1990s, and today the Forum sits alongside the Superstar and Samba as one of adidas’ core heritage silhouettes. It has since been reworked by everyone from Bad Bunny to Beyoncé’s Ivy Park to Willy Chavarria, each treating the Forum’s cross-strap architecture as a canvas rather than a fixed relic.

Close-up of the adidas Forum SQ highlighting its metallic silver upper, sculptural square toe platform, and signature oversized wraparound lacing.

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The current chapter of that story is Forum Cubism, a project that treats the Forum less like a sneaker and more like a dress shoe wearing a shoe’s skin. The upper configuration stays largely intact, but the toe box is squared off and the heel is lifted, echoing the block heel and structured last of formal leather footwear. That collision of a sports shoe’s functional layering with a dress shoe’s silhouette is what gives Forum Cubism its identity: it reads as neither fully casual nor fully formal, and that tension is the point.

The range has proven flexible across materials. A glossy patent leather version pushes the formal reading further, while a special-order collaboration with Forget-me-nots, rendered in soft beige suede, moves toward something closer to a slipper. adidas Originals has also shipped a monochrome “Core Black” and “Cream White” pairing under the Forum Cubism SQ name, each built from premium leather with tonal leather 3-Stripe overlays and a gold-tone Trefoil on the tongue. Two metallic screw-like details sit at the front of the squared sole on those pairs, a small hardware flourish that ties the sole unit visually to the upper’s formal-shoe cues rather than treating it as a purely functional afterthought.

That range of finishes shows Forum Cubism isn’t chasing one aesthetic. The patent pair reads closest to eveningwear, the Forget-me-nots suede pair reads soft and domestic, and the monochrome leather pairs sit in between, sneaker-adjacent but stripped of the branding that usually signals “basketball shoe.” The metallic silver pair joining the lineup this July adds a fourth register: something closer to hardware than to leather goods.

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The women’s Forum SQ arriving this month leans into the design’s fashion-forward instincts with a metallic silver upper, style code KK1596. The leather shifts tone under changing light, giving the shoe a liquid, hard-shine finish rather than a flat metallic. adidas grounds that shine with core black across the tongue, the 3-Stripes, the insole, and the outsole, keeping the palette to two materials so the metallic upper stays the focal point.

The detail that separates this pairing from the brand’s earlier Cubism releases is the lacing. Alongside the standard laces, adidas has added a long white cord that wraps from the instep down and around the sole, treating the lace less as a fastening element and more as a graphic line drawn across the shoe. It is a small addition, but it pushes the shoe further into avant-garde territory, closer to the kind of directional footwear you would expect from a Y-3 or Rick Owens release than a mainline adidas Originals drop.

Detailed view of the adidas Forum SQ outsole showcasing its geometric herringbone tread, sculptural square platform, and embossed adidas logo.

The overall effect is a shoe that photographs almost like sculpture. Metallic silver leather catches light unevenly across the square toe box and the raised heel, so the same pair can look flat gunmetal in overcast light and near-mirrored silver under direct sun or studio lighting, a quality that has made similar metallic finishes popular with editorial and campaign stylists looking for a single accessory that reads as both minimal and maximalist depending on how it is lit.

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adidas Forum SQ’s positioning inside the Originals lineup mirrors what Forum Bold did a few years earlier: take a heritage basketball sil  and push it somewhere the original design was never meant to go. Where Bold added a chunky platform sole for volume, SQ removes bulk and adds architecture, square toe, raised heel, sculpted sole tips, aimed at a customer who wants the Forum’s brand equity without its retro courtside signaling.

That approach has already found traction in Japan, where shoe press has tracked the Forum Cubism rollout closely since its December 2025 debut in “Core Black” and “Cream White.” A “Silver/Burgundy” colorway is also on Japanese retail calendars for later this year, suggesting adidas is treating metallics as a recurring theme for the silhouette rather than a one-off. For a shoe built around the idea of blurring categories, sport and formalwear, shoe and dress shoe, a mirrored silver upper is a logical next step: it is a finish associated as much with jewelry and hardware as with performance footwear.

The timing also lines up with a broader appetite for metallic and liquid-finish leather across sneakers and ready-to-wear, a look that has cycled through runway collections and merge over recent seasons. Positioning the Forum SQ inside that conversation, rather than the more crowded retro-basketball category, gives adidas a way to keep the Forum name relevant to buyers with no interest in its 1984 specs. The sil’s dress-shoe framing does the rest: a squared toe and raised heel already read as fashion-object first, so a hard metallic finish only sharpens an argument the shoe was already making.

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The adidas Originals Forum SQ “Metallic Silver/Core Black” (KK1596) is scheduled to release this July through adidas.com and select retailers. Existing Forum SQ colorways currently retail at $140 in the US; pricing for KK1596 specifically has not been confirmed at the time of writing and should be verified against the live product page before publish.