Mary Katrantzou Teams Up with Adidas

WWD announced that the "Queen of Prints," Mary Katrantzou, is branching out into athletic gear by collaborating with Adidas Originals this fall. The long-term partnership will consist of women's focused apparel and a footwear line. Katrantzou follows in the footsteps of designers like Raf Simons and Rick Owens and is the first women's-focused collaboration since Stella McCartney's.

"As with any collaboration, it's always interesting to see two creative minds combine," Katrantzou told WWD. "It has been a learning curve and [Adidas] sharing their technical knowledge with us has been invaluable to creating this collection. After meeting with the team, I felt they really believed I would add something different to what they have already done in the past, and it was a great challenge for me creatively."

Adidas went to the designer with the idea while she was working on her spring 2014 collection. The timing for her could not have been better.

"[The collection] was based on shoes and a big part of it was based on sneakers, so I felt it was a sign," she said. "When Adidas first approached me, I really took time to think about what I could offer that's different, what I could say through the collection that they haven't said before. I grew up, like so many other kids around the world, wearing Adidas sneakers, and bringing my vision to such a global brand was a great challenge."

"The collaboration between Adidas and Mary Katrantzou merges the exceptional talent of one of the most interesting designers of today and a company that embraces many different cultures from sports, pop, music and fashion," said Dirk Schoenberger, global creative director of Adidas' sport style division. "I admire Mary's extraordinary sense of printing techniques, colors and silhouette that will bring another amazing new aesthetic to the Adidas Originals women's collection."

Even though the collection is categorized as women's, Katrantzou assures that her designs will be unisex. "When we started brainstorming, it was clear that we had a similar customer in mind - it's someone who enjoys life and has fun with clothes," she said. "Age was not important, and we wanted the footwear to be for both men and women."