Header: Courtesy of adidas
The Futurecool is a trainer with no stitches or glue holding pieces together, as it was printed as a single object. adidas has announced it as the newest member of the Climacool family, developed under Alexander Taylor, the company’s senior vice president of innovation design. Four hundred numbered pairs will be released through an online raffle on the 28th of August, and the shoe reaches shops properly in April of 2027.
Printed in one piece
3D printing builds an object up in layers, adding material until it matches the shape of the digital file. adidas has been putting that technology into shoes since 2017, when the Futurecraft 4D was launched with a printed midsole glued to a knitted upper. The machines behind that midsole came from Carbon, a Californian company whose process cures liquid resin with ultraviolet light.
A complete shoe arrived eight years later, in May of 2025, when adidas put the Climacool slip-on on sale worldwide. With the upper, the midsole and the sole all printed together, there were no eyelets, no stitching and no glue anywhere in it. A laced version came in March of 2026, about 15% lighter than the first one, and each pair took roughly a day to print. The Futurecool is the next shoe to be made this way, printed from resin mixed with other materials that adidas has not named.
Air on every side
Climacool, which debuted in 2002, has vents in the sides and sole to allow air to circulate around the foot. The printed shoes, however, have no vents cut into them, since the whole shoe is already full of holes. The body is a lattice, which is a mesh of thin resin bars with open space between them, so air comes in through the upper and the sole from every side – which is what adidas calls “360° breathability“. The lattice also does the cushioning, with thicker and tighter bars where the foot presses hardest and thinner ones where it does not.
The shape
The Futurecool has a curved, sculpted shape, with the iconic three stripes printed directly onto the body of the shoe. Panels of fabric can only be cut and sewn into certain shapes, but printing has no such limit, so the designers can make the sides swell and narrow wherever they want, which is why the Futurecool looks nothing like the other shoes on the shop wall.
“Futurecool redefines what a sneaker can be, combining advanced printing technology and engineering with a design that looks and feels like nothing you have worn before. It’s designed for those who want to embrace the future before it becomes mainstream.”
Alexander Taylor
What printing changes
Making a shoe this way wastes almost no material, since the machine only lays down what the shoe needs and there are no panels to cut out of a larger sheet. The problem comes at the end of the shoe’s life. The polyurethane resin used in these prints is a thermoset, a plastic that hardens for good and cannot be melted down and used again the way an ordinary midsole can. Getting the material back, therefore, means breaking it apart with chemicals.
Until now, these prints have arrived in small drops that sell out in minutes, so April 2027 will be the first time one of them has to sit on a shelf and compete with everything else in the shop.
