The Adidas Spezial x CP Company collaboration is for the real fans

Over the course of a decade, the offshoot of Adidas Spezial has united all wings of fashion: terrace culture, drum and bass, skaters, people who simply love really nice clothes. And now there is the embrace of a real menswear cult: Spezial collaborates with the saint CP company again.

“When we founded Spezial, we made a conscious effort not to be dependent on collaborations with third parties. I have worked on collaborations with third parties throughout my career,” says Spezial’s brand curator Gary Aspden who led landmark partnerships including Bape and Adidas‘ first collection in 2003, and the launch of Y-3 with Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.

Following a collaboration between Adidas Originals and CP Company in 2018, Spezial collaborated with the Italian label to celebrate its 50th anniversary.Cinquanta‘ Celebrations in 2021. This first collection consisted of a camo puffer jacket and Italia CP SPZL sneaker – and that sneaker is back, this time in premium leather with a suede T-toe and ‘Royal Blue/White’ colorway.

Other shoes include the CP Wimberly SPZL, a souped-up version of an ’80s archive sneaker. The white and cream colorway is close to the original, but there are zigzag stitching, serrated eyelets and a perforated toe box. “As much as I love vintage stuff, you look at it and think, ‘that’s nice, but it could be better,’” says Aspden.

Then there is the CP Helvellyn SPZL, a hybrid sneaker walker inspired by the Adidas Nepal, a vintage Three Stripes outdoor boot. “They are not as high as Nepal, we had to change the pattern, change the materialisation, change the colours, so you take things from the archive as a starting point and you take them to a new place,” says Aspden.

On the apparel side, there is a sweatshirt with a graphic image of CP Company’s sailors (founder Massimo Osti was heavily inspired by British sailor uniforms) in Spezial track pants and short and long sleeve T-shirts. Other highlights include a remix of a 70s style bomber once worn David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin – and of course a classic puffer.

“We wanted to make a long puffer jacket. But when the first puffer jacket came back, what else is going on, besides the branding, that has Spezial DNA in it? This looks like it could be a CP puffer jacket, but with Adidas Spezial branding on it,” says Aspden. The final piece was “based on an old Lakeland hiking jacket, so we took the four pockets from that and made them into a long puffer jacket.”