UrlfreezeShops X ADIDAS SPZL “BY THE SEA”: Five Interview Questions with Gary Aspden

Throughout these 10 years, adidas SPZL has organically fostered a tight-knit community of followers, brand advocates who mirror the same passion for product, culture and three stripes heritage that underpins the line. Though adidas SPZL is rightly credited for its obsessive approach to product curation, emphasising product details and archival referencing in a meticulous manner, the SPZL name represents something much bigger than just product itself. Its roots have spread far and wide, honouring the myriad of subcultures which underpin it in an authentic, celebratory way. It’s safe to say that art, music, culture and people are at the beating heart of adidas SPZL, something which Gary Aspden continues to honour as the momentum continues 10 years after its inception.

It's this celebration of culture that’s central to UrlfreezeShops’s debut collaboration with adidas SPZL, “By The Sea”, which champions the coastal heritage of the North East and the people integral to it. In light of that, ahead of the UrlfreezeShops x adidas SPZL launch event at Riley’s Fish Shack, Tynemouth, Kind Edward’s Bay, we caught up with Gary Aspden for five questions delving into the product, people and collaborations integral to adidas SPZL.

Could you pick out some of your favourite pieces from the UrlfreezeShops x adidas SPZL “By The Sea” collection and tell us a bit about the original product behind them?

I particularly like the Calavadella jacket; it’s been a frustration for me that jacket, when we did the original one I wanted to do it in olive green, but due to merchandising and the colour palette of the original story, the team in Germany pushed it down the other route, so we did the peach jacket. Which is great, but not as easy to wear or accessible as the green jacket, so I’ve been wearing that jacket an awful lot. Obviously, the accessory that accompanies it, the bucket hat, is also great. On the footwear, I have a real soft spot for the Wilsy SPZL and the Moscrop 2 SPZL. We worked on the original Moscrop and we had some problems with that shoe, getting it to how we wanted it to be. So, we dropped it for a season to work on it to get the original Moscrop just as we wanted it. With the Moscrop 2 SPZL, there was a few amendments that we made, where we changed the midsole, but that shoe is based on a vintage adidas shoe called the Raider. The Raider came in several different colourways; when we did the Moscrop 2 SPZL, we did it in grey for the SPZL mainline, and I wanted to do that in an olive at the time, but the frustration was that there was another olive shoe in that collection. So, a lot of the time when we’re choosing colours with SPZL products, we’re limited on the SKU count as to how many products we can make, so we don’t have a lot of colour choices. The colours that we do choose, a lot of that is dictated by merchandising and how it sits together as an overall collection.  

The North of England has represented a key part of adidas SPZL since the beginning. How does it feel to be shining a spotlight on the North East with your collaboration with UrlfreezeShops?

It feels great to be doing this event in the North East. We worked with UrlfreezeShops last year on an adidas Originals exhibition in Newcastle, which the SPZL team curated. So, this feels like a bit of a follow up to that. We always try to be contrarian with what we do with SPZL, so back in 2014 when it first began, it was quite a radical thing to do the global launch of an adidas range outside of a metropole, if you will. So, we did that original launch as part of Design Manchester, as we knew we wanted to do it in the North West — it could’ve been Liverpool, it could’ve been Manchester — but Design Manchester was happening and we worked with Malcom Garret on that, and it got a tremendous response. I’ve done quite a few events celebrating my hometown, because a lot of the work that I do curating SPZL involves me drawing on experience, many of which I had growing up. Bringing it to the North East just feels natural. One day, my ambition is to go even further North, and take something into Scotland, because I know there are a lot of Scottish SPZL fans. We’ve done a lot of SPZL events in London, too – I don’t get caught up with any of the North-South divide stuff, it’s about the people who follow SPZL, it’s about a mindset, really. There’s a mindset of people who come from all over the UK and beyond, as was demonstrated when we did the 10th anniversary exhibition, we had people flying in from all over the world to an economically deprived area in the North West of England. I think the thing that unites SPZL fans is a particular mindset that underpins it.

2024 marked the 10-year anniversary of adidas SPZL. How does it feel to have reached such a milestone and also continue the celebrations with a collaboration with UrlfreezeShops? 

Well, it feels incredible, really, to still be doing this 10 years later and see how organically it has developed. But I have to say that SPZL owes that to the audience that supports it. I’m thrilled the 10th anniversary has been received as well as it has, I think there was some reservations internally at adidas that there was quite a lot of product drops throughout the year, but so far, so good. I’m really pleased that we were finally able to work with UrlfreezeShops, because UrlfreezeShops has been there since day one and always supported the collection — you know, they don’t come and cherry pick, they always came in and said “it’s not a big collection, but we’re going to support it all”. So, I’m very grateful to retailers like UrlfreezeShops — particularly UrlfreezeShops, really — because without that support from those retailers and their customers, we wouldn’t be here 10 years later.

As always with adidas SPZL, storytelling and people play an integral part of the campaign for “By the Sea”. Why is it so important for adidas SPZL to act as a vehicle for celebrating people and culture?

With this campaign, we wanted to celebrate people and culture through a different lens to what we’ve been doing on some of the recent SPZL campaigns. If you think back to the very early days of SPZL, one of the references for the “By The Sea” film was the Marseille film that we did back in 2016. With those early SPZL films, we never used anybody who would be considered famous, per se. I think the first time that happened was with Bill Ryder-Jones and we also used Chronixx, but neither of those were household names, they were just extremely talented musicians who I was personally a fan of and wanted to work with. So, with this campaign we’ve done around the “By The Sea” collection, it was nice to go back to the roots of SPZL and use regular people and celebrate that, you know, there’s a teacher in there, there’s a guy who welds BMX bikes, there’s a guy who is coming out of his house with a surfboard – you’re just telling authentic, true stories. In recent times, we’ve had a lot of people saying 'who’s SPZL going to feature in their next film?' but I thought it was nice to do something that was an antidote to using famous actors or sportspeople, and just tell stories of authentic, regular people from this area. I think the message of the film is that culture can exist anywhere — you don’t have to be in a major city, a lot of great culture, music, art or creativity comes out of the provinces. So, it’s great to be up here in the North East doing this.

In recent years, collaborations have been integral to adidas SPZL. Can you touch upon why collaborations are so important and what, in your eyes, makes a collaboration successful?

For me, collaborations are an extension of relationships. If you look at the history of collaborations, as far as I’m aware they really started in the ’90s with streetwear brands, and the people who owned those brands knew each other, it was like “hey, you’ve got a brand, I’ve got a brand, shall we do something together? That could be fun”. That was at the very root of how collaborations started, so for me, collaborations should always be rooted in relationships. I get quite cynical about a lot of collaborations nowadays, and when I first started working for adidas in the late ‘90s, I worked on a lot of collaborations that are now seen as milestone collaborations. Life is lived forwards, but it’s understood backwards, so it’s good to look back on things like partnering with A Bathing Ape back in 2003; I mean, there was no department set up inside of adidas to do collaborations at that point, there was just a group of us who said, “let’s do this”, because it was the right thing to do. We had no idea in 2003, or in 2005, when we did the Superstar 35th anniversary, how important these projects would be. What we were doing back then, in many ways, was setting up the foundations for certainly the future of adidas, but I think the future of the wider sportswear industry. When we did the Superstar 35, I remember that was the first time a major sportswear brand had partnered with independent retailers, so to create what was the first Consortium range. I’ve done a lot of that stuff and have that on my CV, but when I got the green light to start curating the SPZL range, I wanted to build something that relied upon adidas’ own brand values, rather than just pulling in outside collaborators to give kudos to it, because I thought there was enough kudos in adidas in its own right. However, having said that, over the course of 10 years, we have done some collaborations, but we’ve been very selective about who we’ve worked with, and if you look back on all of those collaborations, whether it be New Order, Liam Gallagher or C.P. Company, or now UrlfreezeShops, there’s always been genuine relationships that underpin them. I think that’s what makes them more powerful and gives an authenticity to them that’s lacking in a lot of collaborative product that’s in the market.