Edison Chen’s adidas Originals collab celebrates the Year of the Snake

As we slither into the Year of the Snake, things are about to get a bit more fluid and unexpected. From the Garden of Eden onwards, the snake has been the Earth’s most slandered and maligned creature, associated with treachery, deceit and the gravest crime of all: being a fake friend. But the snake is also a symbol of transformation and reinvention, of shedding old patterns for something fresh. This is the notion which adidas Originals and Edison Chen have taken to to heart with their latest collaboration, a collection that collides tradition and streetwear into something entirely new.

The latest chapter of their boundary-pushing collaboration – the CLOT LNY Superstar – was unveiled in Mexico City last week. Inspired by the Chinese Lunar New Year and the upcoming Year of the Snake, the collection features the Superstar, a sleek sports jacket, long-sleeve t-shirt, socks, and tracksuit bottoms. Each piece weaves together adidas Originals’ classic designs, modern streetwear energy, and subtle nods to traditional Chinese culture.

At Lago Algo, a brutalist structure overlooking a lake at Mexico City’s largest park, I sat down with Chen and two of his designers to find out more about how the collection came together, the design process, and why they decided to launch a Chinese-themed sneaker in Mexico.

First rising to fame as a pop star and actor in 2000s Hong Kong, Chen is now a hugely influential figure in the world of fashion and streetwear (a distinction which, during our conversation, he dismisses as meaningless). His brand CLOT, founded in 2003 with his partners Kevin Poon and Billy IP with the mission of fusing together Eastern and Western culture, has achieved global success with its designs, while Chen has himself collaborated with a number of major brands – the LNY Superstar marks his second outing with adidas Originals.

The seeds of this new collection were first planted back in 2016 when Chen staged ‘New Age Ethnic’, a pop-up show at Paris Fashion Week which blended modern silhouettes with traditional styles drawn from cultures all over the world. “While I was doing research for this collection and going deep into the ethnic culture of China, I began to see so many similarities with the culture of Mexico – I fell in love with the fabrics and tapestries,” Chen tells Dazed. Although the LNY project wasn’t explicitly inspired by Mexico, some of that influence bled into the creative vision at the early stages. “If you look at the apparel, there’s definitely some hints of ethnic prints and knits there,” says Chen.

When it came to launching the collection, Chen saw Mexico City as an intriguing choice for hosting a Chinese New Year celebration. “It felt like it would almost be cliche if we did it in San Francisco or London, so we wanted to do it somewhere new,” he says. While it might not be as well-known as some of its counterparts, Mexico City’s Barrio Chino – a riotously colourful network of streets with umbrellas hanging from wires overhead - is one of the world's most vibrant Chinatowns. “Mexico is very colourful, from the food to the prints to the fabrics. The same is true of China, and we felt like there are a lot of commonalities between the two cultures,” Thomas Van Do, the head designer on the project, tells Dazed. CLOT and adidas Originals are now working on a new collection – titled Barrio Chino – which will draw out these commonalities and take more direct inspiration from Mexican culture, along with old Western movies and a 1970s TV show about a white guy who does kung fu.

Unveiling the new Superstar in Mexico City emphasised the global significance of Lunar New Year, a celebration rooted in China but now embraced by millions – if not billions –of people worldwide. The custom has a special resonance for Chen, even though he didn’t actually grow up with it. “It wasn’t until I moved to Hong Kong as a teenager that I started learning more about it,” says Chen. “When you’re a kid, you love it because you get red pockets and each one of them has about 20 bucks inside.”

The LNY Superstar doesn’t come with 20 bucks inside, but it does feature a shiny gold coin – a symbol of good luck and prosperity in Chinese culture. Along with his designers, Chen wanted to create a Lunar New Year project that would speak to China’s contemporary fashion, streetwear and youth culture as much as its time-honoured customs. To this end, it uses traditional materials like silk and satin in new and often counter-intuitive ways. Every aspect of the collection’s design is highly considered, and while there is a lot going on, it never feels overdone. The shoe, in particular, strikes a delicate balance of referencing the Lunar New Year with each one of its touches, without hitting you over the head with the theme.

Knowing when to dial things down was key to pulling this off. “We could have just gone the route of making the whole shoe snakeskin, but that didn’t feel really authentic to our mission,” adidas designer Samantha Alvarado, who worked on the project, tells Dazed. “Instead, we wanted to hit the storytelling mark in the details.” According to Do, most corporate attempts at Lunar New Year projects end up being obvious and overly literal. “We decided that we didn’t need to scream the Asian angle,” he says. “We wanted to infuse these influences in a high-class way that fits the original brief of the Superstar.”

To avoid being heavy-handed, the snake imagery is used only sparingly throughout the collection. On the varsity jacket, for example, the print has been customised to feature an intricate snake illustration, which is equal parts elaborate and easy to miss. The three stripes on the shoes are embossed with snakeskin, and there is a ‘deubré’ (an ornamental shoe-lace tag), which displays the Chinese character for ‘snake’. From a quick glance, you wouldn’t necessarily realise that the shoes or any of the apparel pieces were snake-themed at all.

While there are flashes of red and gold, the collection is predominantly black – a colour typically associated with mourning and loss. This incongruity was a deliberate decision, and another way of trying to do something different with the theme. “For me, the New Year also has to mean something going away. So I felt like it would be interesting to convey how the past is gone, and after the New Year is when the new colours come in,” says Chen. To convey that sense of celebration, and to make use of the colours most associated with the Lunar New Year, there are gold and red threads woven into the shoes, and the gold coin is tied to the top with a red tassel – red, like gold, being a colour which represents celebration and good fortune. The overall effect is both sumptuous and understated – a little baroque, but only if you look closely enough.

“Mexico is very colourful, from the food to the prints to the fabrics. The same is true of China, and we felt like there are a lot of commonalities between the two cultures” – Edison Chen

Later that evening at Lago Algo, adidas Originals and Edison Chen marked the launch of the LNY Superstar with a trio of immersive workshops led by some of Mexico’s most distinguished creatives. The first – representing ‘The Past’ – was led by Eduardo Sarabia, a Mexican-American artist based in Guadalajara who works with a range of mediums, including ceramics, textile, painting, sculpture and installation. The workshop was focused on screen-printing: at the start we were each handed an illustration of a tree, a design which Sorrabia has used before in a series of linographs titled ‘Sacred Tree’. Scattered around the table were a series of stamps bearing different symbols: fire, a snake, a mushroom, a vinyl record, etc. We were then invited to customise our own illustration by printing these symbols between the leaves of the tree, an activity which, in a fun way, felt very primary school art class (my resulting creation was so chaotic it looked like the work of a not especially precocious five-year-old.) Once we were finished, we took our trees to be screen-printed – a process so opaque it might as well have been alchemy to me, but it looked very impressive.

Next up, representing ‘The Present’, was a workshop with Paulina L Poleta, a visual artist, jewellery designer and founder of the Rodete Studio, whose work draws influence from brutalism, post-modernism and industrial design, along with traditional Mexican materials. Poleta guided us through the process of making a jewellery piece, using a brass coin, which represents Chinese culture, and a black, calcareous stone representing Mexico’s pre-Hispanic heritage. After sanding down the stone, we had to tie these two elements together with a golden thread (I realised that my fingers were nowhere near nimble enough to pull this off and, once again feeling like a five-year-old, had to ask Poleta to do this for me). In keeping with the spirit of the event, this workshop distilled the cultural ties between Mexico and China into strong, elegant visual imagery.

The final session – representing ‘The Future’ – hit like a full-on trance. Not a workshop exactly, but an audiovisual trip conjured by electronic music producer Edgar Mondragón and visual artist Erik López. Lying flat on the floor, swallowed by screens and speakers, I was so immersed it felt almost psychedelic – like I could’ve stayed there forever. The visuals were created using a mixture of AI-generated images and video footage captured in several areas in Mexico City’s historic downtown (including Barrio Chino), while the score was based on the drone and ambient genres. When composing it, Mondragón made use of a technique called ‘pink noise’, where higher frequencies are reduced in volume to mimic natural sounds like waves or waterfalls. At times the effect was discordant and slightly sinister, at others it was euphoric, even transcendent.

Across fashion, art and and music, the workshops transformed the energy of contemporary Mexico into something tangible; each session felt like a collision of tradition and subversion, riffing on the same border-spanning ethos as the LNY Superstar collection itself. Like a snake shedding its skin, they captured the constant churn of reinvention, proving that culture thrives best where boundaries blur.