There’s a recipe in sneakers that gets harder to ignore the longer you watch it: take a half-forgotten model out of the archive, attach a name the skate or streetwear crowd respects, and suddenly we want it again. The Hardies Hardware x adidas Adistar Control 5 fits that template to the letter. The question is whether that’s a problem.
Let me be fair about the shoe itself, because it’s better than the formula behind it. The Adistar Control is a bulky Y2K runner, and in this “Aurora Ruby” make-up it works surprisingly well: a deep red-maroon upper, light-blue patent overlays on the toe and sides, pink laces, and silver studs ringing the lace eyelets. On that chunky black sole the whole thing looks almost too cheerful for a shoe that was once purely functional.
What Hardies actually adds
Hardies is a skate-hardware brand, and collaborations like this lean on credibility more than on plastered logos. That’s the upside here: no shouting branding, just a colour palette with some nerve. The honest counter-argument is just as simple. The Adistar Control wasn’t a wanted silhouette until adidas decided to pry the Y2K vault open one more time, and one sharp colourway doesn’t turn a model into a grail. You’re buying a good execution of a mediocre idea, and that’s fine as long as you know that’s the deal.
€129 at a shop, €240 at a reseller
The price mostly argues in its favour. On Solezilla.com the floor sits at 129 euros at Asphaltgold, with Footshop a euro higher at 130 — that’s regular retail, which for a collaboration in a market that usually tacks a surcharge onto anything co-branded is genuinely reasonable. The reference retail elsewhere is $130, so nobody’s being gouged at the counter.
And then there’s the fourth listing. Geturbrick has the exact same pair at 240 euros — close to double the retail price, for a shoe you can still buy new at a proper shop. That’s the part worth pausing on: all four active listings we track are in euros, there’s no UK or US offer yet, and three of the four are sensible. Pay attention to which one you’re clicking, because the gap between them is entirely avoidable. If you’re shopping from outside the eurozone, add shipping and import on top before you compare at all.
My advice on revivals like this hasn’t changed. Buy it because you like the colour, not because there’s a brand name on the tongue you recognise from your board. At 129 euros for something with this much character, that’s an easy enough case to make — just don’t let anyone sell you the archive story at twice the price.
Line the shops up on the Aurora Ruby page or scroll the rest of the Adistar Control 5 before you decide. Worth it, or just another archive lap? Grail or Bail?