Tobacco Gruen - Dark Brown/Brown

If you're chasing a shoe with one of the most confusing naming conventions then look no further than the adidas Tobacco Gruen. Why do I make such a bold claim? Let's break it down...

The adidas Tobacco was released in 1977. Common practice for this period of adidas was to release models with specific colourways. The City Series was famous for it, but it also extended to other models. One such example is the Tobacco, which was a typical low-profile adidas trainer in tobacco coloured suede.

That's pretty understandable...

This version, is called the adidas Tobacco Gruen – "gruen" being German for "green" – so essentially "Tobacco Green". The reason for this? adidas has an initiative called Gruen which implies the environmentalist use of "green". The Tobacco Gruen uses synthetic uppers devoid of animal hide, which are created with partially recycled contents.

So that makes sense, it's the adidas Tobacco with "green" credentials.

The final piece in this puzzle though really complicates it. By making version of the adidas Tobacco in NON-tobacco colours it starts to break the matrix – did I just get déjà vu? Essentially what we have here is the shoe equivalent of Neil Patrick Harris – a person with three first names – except we've got a shoe with a name comprised entirely of colours.