“Grown-ish” actress Yara Shahidi is making some grown moves of her own with her latest brand collaboration.
The young Hollywood star has unveiled her newest partnership with adidas to curate a five-piece collection as an ode to her Black and Iranian roots, Harper’s Bazaar reports.
“My first instinct was how do we honor the past in a way that also pays homage to the future,” Shahidi tells the outlet. “The one thing that I wanted people to take away was even though a lot of these details are specific to my own growing up and the things that impacted me, the entire campaign is about how we re-create our heritage. I’m constantly figuring out what it means to me to be Black and Iranian—it’s ever changing.”
She also shared the news of her collaboration in an Instagram post captioned, “Y’all knew this was coming ? #collab.”
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According to Harper’s Bazaar, the multi-hyphenate creative and mogul in the making designed the collection to include a pair of classic Superstar sneakers, two jackets and coordinating track pants.
Additionally, the said collection pays homage to the “activists and artists who have shaped Shahidi’s own worldview,” featuring styles that replicate “global colorways and 1960s-inspired silhouettes.”
The details in Shahidi’s adidas collection were attributed to the dozens of mood boards and aesthetics the actress created to reference earthy tones and legendary influences from people like Prince and Bob Marley.
“I had a lot of fun putting it together, because it represents where I’m at and the process that I think we all go through in figuring out how we mix two things that are of extreme importance to us,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “I also had old magazines, and what I love about so many of our cultures, especially prior to the invention of social media and it’s immediate ethos, as we know now is that there was such a global sensibility to ads. I loved looking back at different, older ads. A lot of old Adidas ads are incredible as well, so I pulled a ton of those.”
Versatility was also a huge thing for Yara Shahidi to have embedded in the collection, as she herself looks for ways to stand out and tell her story through fashion.
“I’m a young person that’s constantly in new spaces, and it may sound esoteric, but I feel like I’m constantly approaching things that are brand new, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes exciting, sometimes just I need to find my bearings. There’s an importance of wearing loud colors to me, an importance of being comfortable,” she says. “A lot of my daily uniforms are monochrome tracksuits precisely for that reason. Because it really helps me take up space even in times in which I didn’t know if I deserved the space. And so many times, my clothes either matched where I was [in my life] or helped me get to where I wanted it to be.
Shahidi and adidas Originals’ collaborative collection is set to debut exclusively on May 13 at select North American retailers.