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James Carnes Has Been Changing the Way You Run for 20 Years

He's just done it again with some new technology that's going to change the face of rapidly moving your legs.
Jamie Clifton
London, GB

James Carnes, Creative Director of Sport Performance at adidas, is responsible for an unbelievable amount of innovation in the world of sneaker design over the past 20 years. He's basically the Tesla of trainers, the Thierry Mugler of high performance running shoes, the sneaker game James Dyson with less of the overblown fanfare and passion for air and invisible fans. In the late 90s, he developed the original prototype for adidas' Feet You Wear, then later spearheaded the company's integration with ClimaCool and developed the adiZero technology, which is that stuff you read about going into professional footballer players' boots in every single newspaper at the time.

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James just finished his latest streak of innovating, heading up the team at adidas that developed "Boost" – a new shoe technology that's supposedly going to revolutionise running by being way more responsive than any other trainer and feeding energy back into your feet rather than letting the ground steal it all away. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but it has something to do with air bubbles and all sounds completely legit. I figured now would be a good to time to force James to look back over his career, so met him in New York and got him to do just that.

VICE: Hi James. So, you started your career as an industrial designer – how has that helped you designing for fashion?
James Carnes: Well, industrial design helps teach you different skills and to work with different components, processes and more technological product design, which gave me a good foundation to work from when I started designing trainers. As time went on, I became more interested in developing more into streetwear, but keeping that core of really understanding how a product is built has definitely influenced my design philosophy.

Y-3, adidas' high fashion line with Yohji Yamamoto.

Are there any specific elements of industrial design that play a part in your shoe design?
I used to make furniture, so that's always going to be influential in terms of structurally planning stuff. One of the guys I worked with in London is a designer named Alex Taylor and he does brilliant work. Automotive design is always something I else I look at, but it normally does come back to fashion design as the main inspiration when I'm designing footwear.

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Makes sense, I suppose. You've done some more high fashion stuff with Y-3 and Stella McCartney, how do you find it switching from design that's mostly about functionality to something that's more about aesthetics and fabrics?
It's really more about working out the priority in each case and then finding a balance between the two fields that works. You have to make sure with the functional stuff that it really delivers, which can then be tough to work around aesthetically. Fashion is more about making individual statements, so you get more leeway with how high performance you have to be. Stella was great to work on because it was right in the middle of the two.

Which one do you prefer?
I have to say, it's amazing to be at adidas because they do both. We're the only sportswear brand with a true fashion label – Y-3 – and then we also do things like supply product to the World Cup, every single sport in the Olympics and so on.

Weirdly, loads of fashion kids seem to be wearing really high performance jogging trainers now, so I suppose that kind of puts you right in the middle anyway.
True. And I get that, because high performance running sneakers have a very distinct, clean look. They're arguably a lot more stylised than your basic streetwear sneaker, so it makes sense to me that the kids interested in fashion are taking to wearing them.

What's the process with designing for adidas? It seems like a pretty intimidating job considering the products are going out to so many people. 
It definitely takes time. This whole project for this Boost technology started over three years ago, and it's all a process of trial and error and experimentation. You get those light bulb moments from people along the way, but nothing's ever taken lightly – those moments are all put together over time. The myth of creative genius is sometimes overrated. That's not to say that people don't have moments of genius, but it's getting the right group of people together to share those ideas that gets things done.

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How big a percentage is aesthetics in the whole thing? Surely even the most worthier-than-thou jogging nerd isn't going to buy magenta, Velcro-strapped grandpa trainers just because they perform well.
Oh, it's a huge part of my design philosophy. Products have to be intuitive and appeal to people as something that's going to be emotionally expressive. It's not all about, "Show me all the technology at once in whatever four colours you like." It's the same with cars: sure, you might talk up the engine or whatever, but it's the shell that's always really going to grab you.

Which era of trainer design is your personal favourite?
For me, I’m really partial to the 60s and 70s stuff because there were breakthroughs in things like the first rubber outsole with herringbone, and the superstar was one of the first shoes to use tumble leather, so I like that inventive innovation. But I was going to uni in the 90s, so all that chunky, technology-driven stuff – when computers and lights and high-functionality aspects were first being added to sneakers – is definitely my favourite era personally.

Cool. Thanks, James!

Follow Jamie on Twitter: @jamie_clifton 

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