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Adidas Advantage: the Stan Smith trick, without the price tag of the original

There is one detail that gives the Advantage away as a member of the family of adidas’s most famous tennis shoe. Look at the three stripes: they are not stitched bands but **rows of punched holes in the leather**, exactly like on the Stan Smith. The same design principle, executed in the sport line rather than in Originals. On the midsole sidewall adidas is pressed in full into the rubber, and the accents on the tongue label and heel do the rest.

That immediately sharpens the comparison with its neighbour. The Grand Court lays its stripes as flat bands on top of the leather, while the Advantage omits them. Two shoes from the same corner of the range, one difference you can check on every product photo. If you want the purest court shape, look at the perforations.

The titles read like a small catalogue. Base is the bare base version, Court and Lifestyle Court are the wider variants, Eco and Sustainable mark versions with recycled materials, and Cloudfoam refers to the soft footbed adidas uses in this line. About one in thirty titles is a children’s version, and thankfully it just says so in the name. Collaborations with film studios crop up here more often than you would expect for a shoe in this segment.

It’s tempting to write off such a model as the cheap cousin, but that misses the point. The Advantage is made to be worn every day without thinking about it: white court, small colour accents, done. Not every shoe needs to set off the Geiger counter. Some just have to work.

On this page you can see which versions of the Adidas Advantage are hottest right now according to the Hypescore, from what price they’re available and in how many shops they’re in stock.