ADIDAS HANDS JAH JAH THE F50 TUNIT MEGA

Daquisiline Gomis and Inès Manai did not shoot a shoe commercial. They shot a manifesto, and adidas Originals handed them two boots built two decades apart to make the point.

THE HIGHEST PLACE is the name on the campaign, and it pairs the F50 TUNIT MEGA with the ADISTAR CONTROL 5, per the caption posted by @jahjahstudiodesign. One boot chased interchangeable modularity in the middle of a home World Cup. The other chased stability on the pitch long before it ever touched a sidewalk. Putting them in the same frame is the argument: adidas is treating its boot archive the way a fashion house treats its runway pieces, material a creative director gets to reinterpret, not just a warehouse code to relaunch.

That is the thesis worth sitting with. A football boot brand is commissioning artistic direction the way a couture house commissions a stylist, and the credit line says as much: artistic direction by Daquisiline Gomis, directed and shot by Inès Manai.

Two Boots, Twenty Years Apart, Share One Frame

The F50 TUNIT MEGA pulls from the F50.6 TUNIT, the boot adidas built for the 2006 World Cup on home soil in Germany. The original TUNIT system split the boot into an upper, a sole plate, a chassis and studs that could all be swapped out, one of the first fully modular football boots on the market. It let a player change surfaces without changing shoes, a genuinely odd idea for 2006 that still reads as ambitious now.

adidas already dug through that same archive earlier this month, pulling Adistar and Samba silhouettes back into rotation at Sneakersnstuff. The pattern is consistent. adidas is not inventing new performance stories this cycle, it is re staging old ones with new names attached to them.

Control Is The Older Technology In This Pairing

The ADISTAR CONTROL line dates back to 2004, built around heel support, cushioning and grip tuned for touch and stability rather than raw speed. The CONTROL 5 followed a few years later, layering forefoot cushioning, a torsion system and a stability focused midsole onto that same premise. It sat mostly dormant before resurfacing as a lifestyle release, which is the same move adidas is making here, pulling a boot out of a technical past and letting it live somewhere else, this time inside a campaign instead of a running store shelf.

Jah Jah Studio Is Not A New Name To Adidas

Daquisiline Gomis runs JAH JAH Studio out of Paris, a project that started in 2017 as part of the Afro vegan movement before it grew into a sound system, a fashion label and now a recurring creative partner for adidas Originals. Earlier this year the studio put its own colorway on the adidas Megaride S2, wrapping it in the colors of the Ethiopian flag for its Paris Fashion Week presentation. THE HIGHEST PLACE reads like a continuation of that relationship rather than a one off booking, and it says something that adidas keeps returning to the same collaborator instead of rotating through a new name every season.

That is the cross vertical tell here. Football branded pieces have already been crossing into ready to wear this month, and a Paris fashion studio directing a boot campaign is the same current running the other direction.

Inès Manai Brings A Different Client List To Football

Directed and shot by Inès Manai, per the credits, and her recent work sits with Dior, JW Anderson and Isabel Marant rather than performance football. Her most recent adidas credit outside this campaign is directing the brand's Taqwa Bint Ali project, where she also co wrote the scenario. Bringing a fashion photographer into a boot campaign is not a neutral choice. It signals that the F50 TUNIT MEGA and ADISTAR CONTROL 5 are meant to be looked at the way Vivienne Westwood's eight inch platform boot was looked at this season, as an object first and a performance spec second.

This Reads Warm, Not Hot

Two boots, one from a modular experiment in 2006 and one from a control focused line that started in 2004, are being framed by a Paris creative studio and a fashion photographer instead of a standard football campaign shoot. That is the fact worth repeating: F50 TUNIT MEGA and ADISTAR CONTROL 5, under the title THE HIGHEST PLACE, credited to artistic director Daquisiline Gomis and director Inès Manai. adidas has a genuine creative relationship with JAH JAH Studio that predates this campaign, and that continuity matters more than any single frame in the carousel.