When Adidas launched the SL72 sneaker campaign in July 2024, they had everything in place for a summer blockbuster. A Times Square billboard. A globally recognized supermodel. Full campaign distribution across social, retail, and out-of-home. Within four days, every image of Bella Hadid was wiped from Adidas’ website, social channels, and stores. The brand issued two separate public apologies. Their stock dropped 2.45%, erasing roughly €1.03 billion in market value in a single trading day. And Hadid retained legal counsel to explore action against the brand she had helped make relevant again.
The story of Bella Hadid and Adidas runs deeper than one pulled campaign. It begins two years earlier with one of fashion’s most commercially successful luxury streetwear collaborations, involves a model who single-handedly revived a silhouette that sold out worldwide, and ends with a crisis that nobody at Adidas apparently saw coming despite context that should have triggered every alarm in the building.
This is what happens when a brand confuses cultural relevance with cultural awareness.
The Balenciaga x Adidas Collab That Started It All
When two worlds collided on a trading floor
In May 2022, Balenciaga’s creative director Demna made one of fashion’s most audacious venue choices: the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. That was where he unveiled the brand’s first-ever Adidas collaboration, a Spring/Summer 2023 collection that merged Balenciaga’s signature deconstruction with Adidas’ Three Stripe heritage. Oversized tracksuits reimagined as boardroom wear. Stan Smiths deliberately distressed to look worn-out. The Hourglass bag stamped with Trefoil branding. The Pantashoes, a cross between a high heel and a tracksuit bottom, priced at $3,790 and sold out on launch day.
Bella Hadid was the anchor of the official campaign. She had been a Balenciaga muse for years, and her relationship with Adidas was already producing measurable results. Just months earlier, she had been photographed in Adidas Sambas at Milan Fashion Week, and those shoes sold out worldwide within weeks. When Adidas and Balenciaga needed someone to make a silhouette culturally unavoidable, the casting was obvious.
The SS23 campaign was shot in an empty Manhattan high-rise by photojournalist Joshua Bright, featuring:
- Bella Hadid: Wearing the $750 co-branded football shirt, $1,500 Three Stripe wide-leg track pants, and $850 off-white sneakers as the hero campaign image
- Isabelle Huppert: French actress and Balenciaga ambassador, posing with the co-branded Hourglass bag priced at $2,100
- Han So-hee: Korean actress tapping into Balenciaga’s fast-growing Asia-Pacific market
- Jermell Charlo and Khadim Sock: Adding athletic credibility and cultural range to the campaign ensemble
The collection dropped simultaneously on Balenciaga and Adidas retail sites on November 3, 2022, with exclusive pop-ups in Bangkok, Dubai, Los Angeles, Osaka, Seoul, Tokyo, and Toronto. The full tracksuit look worn by Hadid carried a combined price tag of over $6,000. Pieces sold out fast. The collaboration had the architecture of a clean brand moment.
Then Balenciaga burned everything down
Two weeks after the Adidas campaign launched, Balenciaga’s world collapsed. A separate campaign, entirely unrelated to Adidas, showed child models photographed with BDSM-styled teddy bears. A subsequent discovery linked another campaign image to legal documents from a child pornography case. Consumer fury spread instantly across social media and into mainstream news coverage.
The Adidas collaboration absorbed collateral damage. Kering’s Francois-Henri Pinault acknowledged in a February 2023 investor call that Balenciaga experienced “a difficult month of December” with sales impacted in the US, UK, and Middle East. The Lyst Index tracked Balenciaga’s collapse from the number one hottest brand in early 2022 to number 11 in Q4 2022, then further down to number 18 by Q1 2023.
The financial damage to Balenciaga from the crisis was concrete:
- Revenue decline: Fell from €1.39 billion in 2022 to nearly €1.17 billion in 2023, a drop of over €220 million
- Operating profit: Collapsed from €299.65 million in 2022 to approximately €44.93 million in 2023
- Equity: Dropped sharply from €359 million to €81.49 million as retained earnings took a direct hit
- Lyst ranking: Brand fell from number one to number 18 out of 20 within two quarters
Hadid was not implicated in Balenciaga’s child imagery scandal. But she stepped back publicly, deleted campaign content from her feed, and the collaboration chapters closed quietly. The episode established a pattern: Bella Hadid in high-profile Adidas-adjacent work, followed by institutional crisis that she did not cause but could not fully separate herself from either.
The Samba Effect and Why Adidas Wanted Bella Back
How one model revived a 70-year-old shoe
The commercial logic behind casting Hadid as the SL72 campaign face in 2024 was rooted in documented results. When she was photographed in Adidas Sambas at Milan Fashion Week in 2022, the shoe sold out worldwide within weeks. A silhouette that had existed since the 1950s without generating serious hype became the defining sneaker of that year. Retailers reported waiting lists stretching months. Resale prices climbed across every secondary market platform.
That Samba moment made Hadid one of the most commercially potent forces in global sneaker culture. Adidas had real revenue evidence that her organic endorsement of a silhouette could transform it from a catalogue item into a cultural object. When they planned the SL72 relaunch for summer 2024, ahead of the Paris Olympics, the casting logic was straightforward.
The SL72 launch had every structural advantage Adidas could build in:
- Olympic timing: Summer 2024 with retro runner aesthetics at peak demand as the post-Samba successor silhouette
- Two iterations: SL72 RS and SL72 OG launched simultaneously across five new colorways
- Times Square billboard: Hadid’s face on a major Midtown Manhattan outdoor placement generating earned media
- Immediate market signal: Adidas stock jumped from €228 to €240 per share in the two days after her campaign images dropped on July 15 and 16
- Ensemble cast: A$AP Nast, Jules Koundé, and Sabrina Lan completed the campaign to extend demographic reach
Hadid was present for the Times Square billboard unveiling on July 11, posing in the SL72s for press photos. The campaign imagery by photographer Kenny Germé showed her holding a coordinated bouquet of red carnations. The visual choices, in retrospect, carried more symbolism than anyone at Adidas appeared to consider during production.
Four Days That Destroyed the Campaign
The timeline of a brand crisis in real time
The SL72 sneaker was originally designed for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Those Games were catastrophically overshadowed by the Munich Massacre, in which the Palestinian militant group Black September took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage at the Olympic Village, killing 11 of them along with one German police officer. It remains one of the most devastating events in Olympic history.
Bella Hadid is half-Palestinian through her father, Mohamed Hadid, and has been one of the most visible advocates for Palestinian causes in fashion and entertainment. She and her sister Gigi donated $1 million to Palestinian humanitarian charities in June 2024. She wore a red keffiyeh dress at Cannes in May 2024. Her public stance had generated international media coverage for months before the SL72 campaign launched. None of this was obscure.
The crisis escalated with extraordinary speed across four days:
- July 15 to 16: Campaign images of Hadid in the SL72 drop publicly. Stock rises. Campaign launches without incident
- July 18: The American Jewish Committee posts on X calling the campaign “a massive oversight or intentionally inflammatory.” The Israeli government’s official X account amplifies the criticism internationally
- July 19: Adidas pulls all images of Hadid from social media, its website, and stores. Issues first statement calling connections to 1972 “completely unintentional” and announcing it is revising the campaign
- July 21: TMZ reports Hadid has retained legal counsel. Adidas stock drops 2.45%, erasing approximately €1.03 billion in market value. Brand issues a second apology on Instagram Stories, this time naming Hadid and co-stars specifically
- July 29: Hadid posts a statement on Instagram Stories saying she had no knowledge of the historical connection and would never have participated had she known
#BoycottAdidas trended on X from opposite directions at the same time. Jewish organizations called for accountability over the casting. Pro-Palestinian voices accused Adidas of racism and called the removal of Hadid a political capitulation. The brand had produced a controversy that alienated audiences on both sides with no clean resolution available to either.
What Hadid actually said
Her statement was personal and carefully worded. She wrote that she was “shocked, upset, and disappointed in the lack of sensitivity that went into this campaign.” She accepted partial responsibility alongside the brand, saying both her team and Adidas should have done more research. She made clear she does not support hate in any form, including antisemitism, while affirming her identity as a “proud Palestinian woman.” All campaign content had already been deleted from her Instagram before the statement went up.
Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden addressed the lawsuit reports in press interviews, stating he had “not heard anything that she’s going to sue us.” The legal posturing appeared to serve primarily as leverage to secure the second public apology that named Hadid directly and acknowledged the impact on her. The revised campaign continued with the remaining cast but Hadid was removed from all SL72 materials entirely.
What This Cost Both Sides
The business math behind the crisis
Adidas was in the middle of one of its strongest recovery periods when the SL72 controversy hit. The brand had spent two years rebuilding after the Ye/Kanye West split in October 2022, which left it holding roughly €500 million in unsellable Yeezy inventory. The turnaround was working. Revenue was recovering, margins were improving, and the Samba and Gazelle had become the dominant silhouettes in global sneaker culture.
The SL72 controversy landed just weeks before the Paris 2024 Olympics, where Adidas was positioned as the official sportswear partner with global campaign investment riding on that window. The €1.03 billion single-day market cap loss was recovered over subsequent weeks, but the lost momentum, the distraction from Olympic activation, and the reputational cost during a critical quarter were real.
The layered business consequences ran in both directions:
- SL72 relaunch momentum lost: Genuine market interest in the shoe was consumed by crisis before it could convert to sales at scale
- Hadid relationship damaged: The model responsible for the Samba phenomenon was no longer usable as a credible Adidas face in the short term
- Olympic window disrupted: Brand narrative entering Paris 2024 was shaped by apologies rather than celebration and partnership storytelling
- Ye precedent compounded: Having already navigated one major antisemitism-related crisis in 2022, Adidas had zero margin for a second controversy in the same category
- Hadid’s reputational exposure: A model who caused no crisis found herself at the center of global political controversy through institutional failure that was not hers
The vetting failure that made this preventable
The question that was never satisfactorily answered is who, at any stage of the SL72 campaign development, recognized the combination of Hadid’s identity and the shoe’s history and chose to proceed anyway. Adidas has global compliance teams, legal review processes, and a communications department that had spent two years managing Yeezy fallout. The elements creating the controversy were not hidden.
The SL72’s connection to Munich 1972 was not obscure sports history. It was a publicized part of the shoe’s heritage that Adidas itself was using as the marketing angle, celebrating its “retro origins” in campaign materials. Hadid’s Palestinian identity and public advocacy had been covered extensively in international press throughout 2023 and into 2024. Identifying the collision of those two facts required no investigative research. It required only that someone in the decision chain ask the obvious question before a single image was shot.
The Pattern Adidas Should Have Seen
Three years of paid lessons
The SL72 crisis was not Adidas’ first encounter with culturally charged celebrity casting generating catastrophic backlash. The Ye termination in October 2022 had ended a partnership worth an estimated $1.5 billion in annual revenue after public antisemitic comments. That crisis had cost the brand far more than the SL72 controversy ever did, and it had occurred less than two years before. The institutional memory of that damage should have heightened every sensitivity check around anything touching Jewish communities or Middle Eastern geopolitics.
Adidas had already absorbed expensive lessons across back-to-back years:
- Ye/Kanye split, October 2022: Terminated an estimated $1.5 billion annual partnership after antisemitic public statements, taking significant Yeezy inventory write-downs on roughly €500 million in unsellable product
- Balenciaga x Adidas collateral, November 2022: The co-branded collaboration absorbed reputational damage from Balenciaga’s separate child imagery crisis despite no direct wrongdoing by Adidas
- SL72 crisis, July 2024: A preventable casting combination triggered market losses, two public apologies, and potential legal exposure in the same period as the Paris Olympics activation
What separates the SL72 situation from the others is the prevention argument. The Ye crisis involved unpredictable individual behavior. The SL72 crisis involved a fixed historical record and a well-documented public identity. Both were available before any campaign work began. This was not a surprise that emerged after launch. It was a predictable outcome that institutional process failed to surface.
What Bella Hadid’s value actually includes
The episode also exposed what brands actually buy when they cast Bella Hadid. She does not deliver demographic reach through follower counts alone. She creates authentic cultural moments because she is genuinely embedded in the currents she represents. The Samba effect happened because her taste reads as real to the audiences that follow her, not performed for a contract.
That same authenticity makes her identity inseparable from her commercial value. Her Palestinian heritage, her political advocacy, her specific presence in global conversations about the Middle East are all part of why she carries the influence she does with the audiences brands want to reach. Casting her while ignoring those dimensions is not a risk management gap. It is a failure to understand the product being purchased.
The Bottom Line
The Bella Hadid Adidas story is two campaigns with completely different outcomes. The Balenciaga x Adidas SS23 collaboration showed what happens when creative ambition, the right face, and genuine cultural momentum align: sold-out drops, global press, and a commercially successful luxury streetwear moment, before being absorbed into a Balenciaga crisis that Hadid had no part in creating.
The SL72 campaign showed what happens when a brand treats heritage as a marketing angle without recognizing what that history means in the context of the specific person placed inside it. A €1.03 billion single-day market loss, two public apologies, and a legal threat were the cost of a casting decision that should have been flagged at concept stage.
Five things every brand should take from this:
- Heritage cuts both ways: A shoe’s retro origins are a marketing asset or a liability depending on who fronts it and what that history actually contains
- Ambassador identity is not separable: Casting Bella Hadid means casting her complete cultural identity, not just her face and reach
- Ask the obvious question early: Any combination of talent and product touching geopolitical history requires explicit clearance at the concept stage, not after launch
- Prior crises raise the bar: Adidas had already paid billions to understand antisemitism sensitivity; a second episode in the same category two years later is institutional failure
- The talent pays the price too: Hadid bore public scrutiny, reputational complexity, and political pressure for a campaign she could not evaluate because the brand that hired her failed to brief her properly
