Glass Cypress coffee-dyes adidas Stan Smiths for an artisanal worn-in look

Glass Cypress took adidas’s cleanest canvas and made it look lived in, then left the evidence visible. For its first sneaker, the Houston label sent 35 pairs of Stan Smiths through a coffee-dyed transformation that softened the leather, stained it unevenly and pushed the sneaker away from factory polish and into something more intimate, more collectible.

Saber Ahmed, Glass Cypress’ co-founder and creative director, said the shoe was familiar enough to nearly vanish, which is exactly why the brand wanted to intervene by hand rather than shout over it. Glass Cypress prefers to call the project an “interpretation” rather than a collaboration, and that distinction matters here: the sneaker was treated less like a logo exercise than like a cloth object in the studio, worked over until it felt “handled, worn, and slightly displaced from the present.” After the coffee bath, each pair was individually distressed and airbrushed with dark stains around the heel, creating subtle differences in warmth and tonal shift from shoe to shoe.

The details are what keep the idea from feeling gimmicky. The plastic eyelets were removed. The standard cotton laces were swapped for thick washed silk laces, with loose thread wrapped around the ends, a small but telling gesture that makes the finish feel unruly in a deliberate way. The result is not a sneaker trying to look destroyed; it is a sneaker made to look like it has accumulated time, touch and a very specific kind of wear that mass production cannot fake.

That approach sits neatly inside Glass Cypress’ wider language. Founded in 2016, the label is rooted in the Bangladeshi heritage of Saber and Samee Ahmed and in techniques such as Nakshi Kantha hand-embroidery and vegetable-dyed cloth made in Bangladeshi workshops. The brand’s Houston headquarters on Indiana Street in Montrose gives it a local base, but its references travel far beyond Texas. That same mix of craft memory and modern streetwear context made the adidas project feel less like a novelty drop than a considered material study.

The Stan Smith was an unusually strong base for that exercise. adidas traces the shoe to the Robert Haillet tennis model of the mid-1960s, with Stan Smith’s name first appearing on pairs in 1973, and the brand now describes it as an iconic 1971 tennis classic with perforated three stripes. On adidas’s U.S. site, the model sits at $100, a clean retail counterpoint to Glass Cypress’ hand-finished version. The project was introduced at an intimate dinner at H. Lorenzo in Los Angeles, a setting that suited a shoe built to look less like inventory and more like an object with a history already written into its surface.