Jerry Lorenzo’s Fear of God Athletics looks to bounce back with Adidas FOGA II sneakers

Ever since Fear of God founder and designer Jerry Lorenzo announced his Fear of God Athletics partnership with Adidas in 2020, loyalists of both brands waited patiently to see their promise to “revolutionize the performance basketball industry forever” come to life. It took three years for the first looks with the three stripes to arrive. Even though the shoe failed to live up to its performance expectations, multiple colorways sold out online or fetched mortgage payment prices on the resell market, signaling that parts of Fear of God’s core fan base beyond basketball appreciated the shoe on some level. But with Lorenzo and Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden acknowledging the tension and drastic changes made since the alliance started, many are waiting to see how each will pivot.

“A performance shoe has a higher level of attributes that it has to have,” Lorenzo said of the lesson learned from the Fear of God Athletics One Model, called FOG I for short. “There’s a lot of things with fashion that you’re able to get away with because it’s fashion. With performance, it can’t be off because you can’t perform. So trying to push certain aesthetics into something that does what it’s intended to do is a very tough thing.”

After a year and a half of tough conversations, Lorenzo and Adidas’ design team think they’ve hit the sweet spot between style and function they missed the first time with the new Fear of God Athletics II Basketball shoe. 

“Jerry is obviously coming from much more of a luxury background with the focus on silhouette, material and shape,” Adidas senior design director Shane Ward said. He has developed shoes for former NFL players Keyshawn Johnson and Eddie George with Adidas. “We come from a background that’s athlete-driven, purely performance-testing. I think a lot of it had to just do with patience and listening and understanding both sides, which ultimately landed in trust.”

Lorenzo’s design aesthetics were evident in the FOG I. With both the FOGA II Lo and Hi, the shape is still there, but gone are nice-to-haves, such as the thermoplastic polyurethane film overlay, ankle bungees and lace toggles. The FOG II focuses on the need-to-haves, built around a unibody-fit sock with a breathable neoprene collar for comfort and the lacing system attached to an outer shroud for containment when making lateral movements. The sculpted midsole still features the translucent rubber Fear of God footwear is known for, and the medial side is broken up with Lightstrike foam to offer more flexibility and make it lighter.

The outsole features a new Fear of God Athletics proprietary “adaptive sole,” made up of an undulating fingerprint pattern that simultaneously gives grip and removes weight. Just as its predecessor, the FOGA II’s upper draws inspiration from vintage versions of the Adidas Predator soccer shoe. Except here, the molded cage is replaced with a lightweight microsuede, and the “three stripes” are cut out to expose a ventilated mesh base. For the FOGA II Hi, the straps were conceived from ankle supports that players such as former Adidas athlete and NBA player Derrick Rose wear on the court.

“Those are engineering feats that we had to have difficult discussions on because there might have been one ambition early on, but we had to land it so that athletes believed in it,” Ward said, adding that the straps for the FOG II Hi provide more of a cinch than traditional high-top basketball shoes. “Through talking with athletes and bringing Jerry back the critical information, we were able to get to spaces like this that we could not land at before.”

“I would’ve liked the toe box to not be as round,” Lorenzo said, noting that he also had to compromise on the internal cushion support around the ankles, calling them “fat.”

“I pushed that as far as I could. It’s the shape that I’m really trying to design around. When you see that silhouette from far away, do you know that it’s Fear of God? That was the hardest thing. To really put that into the lens of performance and not compromise.”

The FOG II has already exceeded the first version on the court. When the Fear of God Athletics One Model was released in December 2023, it debuted with Indiana and the University of Miami. However, the shoes received a lukewarm response, as many players chose not to wear them, and they ultimately never made it to the NBA.

One year later, Los Angeles Lakers guard Gabe Vincent has already worn different FOG II colorways in multiple games this season. The shoe was also worn twice in the same game on Nov. 10, when Toronto Raptors guard Jamal Shead wore them against the Lakers.

“The first night Gabe hooped in it, it was cool and exciting, but everything to me was about, is he gonna play in it again,” Lorenzo said. “That has been the biggest gift that’s been given back to me because it was really that performance piece that I felt like I hadn’t really proven.”

Redemption is also coming in the form of a partnership with the next-generation basketball league Overtime Elite in Atlanta. On Nov. 7, Adidas and Fear of God Athletics announced that Fear of God will be represented as the eighth team in the league. The partnership was introduced in a news conference and panel hosted by former NBA player Matt Barnes at Overtime Elite Arena, where the players and coach Cilk McSweeney were introduced with a video montage of them modeling their threads as the opening lines of Tupac Shakur’s “Pain” played.

Team Athletics will compete against fellow players ages 16-20 with pro ambitions. With their own squad, Fear of God Athletics will outfit players and coaches in shoes, uniforms, warmups and other gear for the 2024-25 season. Composed of players from Florida high school basketball powerhouse Calvary Christian Academy, the pairing with Fear of God is as serendipitous as it sounds. According to Lorenzo, he was already in talks to work with Overtime Elite when a mutual friend told him that McSweeney’s team was joining.

“When we found out that it was a possibility to work together and this was the team, I said 100% we have to make this happen,” Lorenzo said. He learned about Overtime Elite’s involvement from his teenage son, who watches the games religiously. “It was a divine thing that happened and brought us here.”

“Nowadays [people] are talking more about high school and grassroots basketball than they are about college or the NBA,” former NBA player Damien Wilkins, Overtime Elite’s head of basketball, said. Among his responsibilities is boosting exposure by connecting the league and its players with brands. Last season Overtime Elite had a similar arrangement with hip-hop festival brand Rolling Loud.

“Connecting with [Fear of God] brings a lot of exposure to our league and to them, it’s a mutual thing … All of our guys wear this stuff anyway, so it just made sense.”

Team Athletics’ OTE Arena debut Nov. 8 against back-to-back champions City Reapers felt like the official introduction. As players and coaches emerged from the locker room and formed their warmup lines, fans and opposing players’ eyes widened with intrigue and envy as the team hit the court with the new FOG II sneakers and outfits to match.

“Y’all look so tough,” a kid sitting near the bench was overheard saying.

With Fear of God’s well-known design language doing the talking, the team instantly stands out from the other Overtime Elite teams, which either feature more colorful decorations or no fashion cues at all, something that Fear of God has already pointed out through social media.

Fortunately, Team Athletics plays as good as they look. They defeated the Reapers 97-90 as senior four-star recruit Shon Abaev, who committed to the University of Cincinnati on Nov. 28, scored 37 points. And as far as the shoe is concerned? That same kid who complimented the team before tipoff was standing in the same spot after the game, asking players if he could have their shoes. He left empty-handed.

“They did their thing on the shoe, it feels great,” said Abaev, who swapped out the textured laces with turquoise ones of his own. “It may look heavy, but it’s not heavy at all. You can move in it. I’m a point guard, doing a lot of cutting a lot of stuff. It’s holding up really well. I was surprised.”

With basketball shoes, especially Adidas models such as Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards’ signature shoe, becoming popular off-court again, the FOGA II has the potential to be a shoe that Lorenzo described as “something you can go out and [score] 50 in, and also go out on the weekend with.”

“I really wanted to create something that would have felt like, to me when I opened up a pair of Jordans back in ’91, ’92,” Lorenzo said. Before joining Adidas, he created a Fear of God basketball shoe with competing brand Nike in 2018. “I really felt that footwear at some point needed to head back to that.”

“Back then there was much more obsession to design,” Ward said, mentioning names such as design legends Tinker Hatfield, Steve Smith and his own longtime mentor, Peter Moore. He said that many brands and designers have begun focusing unevenly on tech and performance in recent years. “After a while it starts to forget about what’s happening outside of the court and in culture.”

But don’t get it confused. Lorenzo still wants it to be known that the FOGA II is meant to be played in.

“I’ve made enough shoes for people to walk around the world in. I can do that with my eyes closed,” he said. “But I really wanted to create something that did what it was intended to do, which is for you to be able to hoop in.”

He paused, “This is [Fear of God’s] third quote, unquote, basketball shoe, but I’d really like to call it our first.”