Song for the Mute is the Sydney fashion brand behind Adidas’ newest sneaker
For 12 years, Song for the Mute has been Australian fashion’s best kept secret. Soon, the brand will join Beyoncé, Pharrell, Raf Simons and Yohji Yamamoto as Adidas collaborators.
Song for the Mute’s Instagram direct messages have been running hot. Ever since an image of a pair of sneakers the Sydney-based fashion brand designed in collaboration with global sportswear giant Adidas was leaked online about a month ago, its cult following has been sliding in, desperate for more information.
“We’ve been receiving messages about how to get them from people in America… Europe… all over Australia,” says co-founder and brand director of Song for the Mute Melvin Tanaya. “It’s the first time Adidas has collaborated with an Australian brand on this scale. But we were so focused on doing the design and the campaign that we didn’t really think about what it could mean for the brand.”
Those early expressions of interest suggest it means big things. In late August, when it was announced that 100 pairs of the Song for the Mute x Adidas Originals Shadowturf sneakers were being released via the official Adidas Confirmed app, demand was through the roof. This first release was only made available in the Chinese, Korean and Japanese markets; in China alone, which has become Song for the Mute’s biggest market, 11,000 people signed up to receive a pair. The interest prompted Adidas to increase the Chinese release to 600 sneakers. At $210, every pair sold out instantly.
“We had to work with Adidas right away and go, ‘okay, what can we do at this stage to have more [stock] allocated?” says Tanaya. “And literally, the whole world just thought it was a shoe. Now they’re like, ‘wow, it comes with apparel and everything!’”
Tanaya is with his co-founder and Song for the Mute creative director Lyna Ty when we chat. The duo are busy putting the final touches on an immersive retail space in Paddington, Sydney, which will open to the public today. While the Adidas collaboration won’t be available to shop at the pop-up — the collab doesn’t go on sale until September 23 — all three drops of the brand’s autumn/winter 2022 collection will be available to try on and purchase.
“We’ve always loved having these offline events, a gathering for our community and peers where we can showcase what we’ve been up to,” explains Tanaya. “Clothing is just one part of how we communicate. It’s about the whole Song for the Mute world.”
Adidas first approached Song for the Mute about collaborating two years ago. The sportswear titan was looking to create something interesting and high-end that would resonate in the Asia-Pacific region, as its most successful collaborations were coming out of the US (Beyonce’s Adidas x Ivy Park, Adidas x Pharrell Williams) or Europe (Adidas x Craig Green, Adidas x Gucci).
Song for the Mute was a name that kept coming up. In twelve years, the independent label founded by Sydney schoolmates Melvin Tanaya and Lyna Ty has gone from debuting at Australian Fashion Week to selling at the world’s most influential fashion retailers — SSENSE, Dover Street Market and Lane Crawford are all stockists. The brand’s post-streetwear aesthetic and crafty approach to detail and styling have attracted a loyal following of customers looking for thoughtful fashion with an idiosyncratic twist. Unless you’re one of those customers, Song for the Mute might just be the most popular fashion brand you’ve never heard of.
But the brand has never done anything on the scale of an Adidas collaboration. And when a representative from Adidas contacted Song for the Mute — the message came via WeChat, which Song for the Mute uses to update fans about new releases and special projects — it wasn’t with modest ambitions. They were looking for a designer to head up an entirely new Adidas brand, a bit like its highly successful Y-3 line, which debuted in 2003 and is designed in collaboration with Japanese fashion visionary Yohji Yamamoto.
“We went into the meeting thinking it was just going to be a conversation about designing a pair of shoes,” says Tanaya with a chuckle. “It was too big,” adds Ty, who, as Song for the Mute’s creative director, is the architect behind all of the brand’s apparel. “We like to take small steps. And we’d never made a shoe before, so we were like… let’s start with that.” Adidas agreed.
The hallmark of every Adidas collaboration is a sneaker — when Raf Simons remixed the iconic Stan Smith sneaker, it became the fashion sets go-to shoe, while in more recent times, British designer Wales Bonner has re-popularised the Adidas Samba, a model that was first designed in 1950 as an indoor football shoe.
But the style Ty chose to reimagine as part of Song for the Mute’s collaboration has less of a legacy. Released in February this year, the ‘Shadowturf’ sneaker has a decidedly ‘Dad’ aesthetic, which harks back to running shoes from the nineties and early 2000s.
For Ty, the Shadowturf was ideal. It chimed with the ’90s vibe of the brand’s autumn/winter 2022 collection — or ‘chapter’, as Song for the Mute calls its seasons. The chapter is called ‘Les Olympiades’, and it takes its name from an area in Paris’ 13th district where Ty was raised.
When it came to designing the Adidas collaboration, the creative director was intent on infusing it with the same feeling of youthful camaraderie that inspired Les Olympiades. So she approached the range as an extension of the brand’s current chapter, rather than a separate entity, which is what really sets Song for the Mute x Adidas apart from other designer-brand collaborations of this era. “It’s like a little injection into the story,” offers Ty.
The most challenging part of the process was Song for the Mute-ifying the sneaker, as the designer admits she’d “never thought about an object on your foot”. “It’s such a small object, but every little detail does something,” she muses. But it was also the most rewarding aspect, in no small part because Adidas gave her complete creative freedom.
“There was a lot of cutting and chopping. We drew on the shoe, deconstructed it and taped it back together… We didn’t want to create something trendy, we wanted it to be quite archivable and classic.” The finished product will be available in three different colour ways — Honeycomb, and the yet-to-be-released Dusty Pink and Midnight — and Ty says it contains nods to the brand’s textile-driven garments. “The mix-match fabrics we use, the asymmetric, inside-out style of the shoe — we play on that with our clothes as well. Altogether, there’s about 20 different materials in the shoe.”
“Adidas said it’s the most complex shoe they’ve ever done, material-wise,” Tanaya chimes in. “They usually stick to three, or five materials per shoe, because the brand’s aesthetic is quite minimal. But we pushed it to 20. They had to do some extensive testing to make sure it passed their tests,” he adds with a chuckle.
The apparel component of the collaboration, which consists of 10 pieces, is slightly more stripped back. It features sweatsuits in ripstop-style fabric, oversized T-shirts and luxe gym shorts in the same three colour stories as the sneakers. Prices for the clothing range from $160 to $400.
It was only days ago that fans of the brand discovered there was more to the collaboration than sneakers, when Adidas Originals posted images of the official campaign, which was shot on location in Paris, to its global Instagram account. Tanaya and Ty admit they weren’t expecting the brand to do that — the focus of this first collaboration is primarily the APAC region — but the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Already, Adidas predicts the entire collaboration will sell out in the first weekend.
“A lot of people have been asking us that — if we’re ready,” says Tanaya. “We just wanted to release it. We haven’t been thinking about the aftermath… But now we’re like, ‘okay, it’s launching. We need to make sure we have the infrastructure, if the brand grows.”
In the meantime, Ty and Tanaya have an immersive retail space to open and a crowd of friends, industry peers and fans to welcome into the Les Olympiade shop, which has an industrial-style interior that feels like a slice of Paris’ 13th in Sydney.
Cool, calm and remarkably modest, you’d never know they’re T-minus-one-week away from dropping the collaboration of a lifetime. And certainly, when September 23 rolls around and Song for the Mute x Adidas becomes available online and in stores across the Asia-Pacific, including the brand’s showroom in the Sydney neighbourhood of Glebe, the Australian brand will go from feeling like a best kept secret to sitting alongside Y-3, Beyoncé, Pharrell, Simons and Bonner as official Adidas collaborators.
But despite the looming hype, Tanaya and Ty are the last people to let success go to their heads.
“At the end of the day, it’s up to Lyna and myself to decide how fast the brand grows,” says Tanaya. “We need to be smart in both creative and business. But I think we’re at a crossroads between being ready to take that next step.”
Song for the Mute x Adidas Originals will be available on September 23, via songforthemute.com, adidas.com.au and through select retailers.
The Les Olympiades immersive retail space is open until September 26 at 17 Oxford Street, Paddington, from 10am–6pm.