The chief function of a sneaker is to aid movement, usually in a forward motion. But sometimes, for progress to happen, you have to take a step backwards first. Nike’s Dunk and adidas’ Superstar are iconic shoes and talismans of their respective makers. And yet, neither today is foremost associated with the sport that led to their creation: basketball. They have both been on a journey, and continue to take us on journeys of our own. Their latest incarnations have arrived, below, along with two other resurrected lines, including one reborn as a, er, sandal.

We imagine the adidas archives to be something like those in the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, with treasures of track and field rather than the occult squirrelled away in boxes. Like declassified yet heavily redacted documents relating to UFO sightings, the trickle of reissues from this secretive sportswear giant does little to dispel this notion. The City Series is one outlet for these rereleases, with old styles reborn with the name and sensibilities of first European then global cities in mind. Do not, however, assume that this latest drop, called Sunshine, has been repurposed to survive on the nuclear fusion reactor at the core of our solar system. Rather, it’s the silhouette that shares much of the DNA of the 1970s Tobacco model, only in a cheery celestial yellow with a cheeky sun design on the tongue. And the name is probably best said in the manner of a Gallagher brother.

Argon is a noble gas and the third-most abundant of all the gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. Supplies of these Nike Dunks in a namesake colourway, meanwhile, are far less bountiful. And rather than inert, the examples that we do have are likely to shift fast. There is of course no shortage of Dunks that have gained legendary status in sneakerhead circles, but this iteration is of particular note. Originally part of the 2001 CO.JP series that kick-started fashion’s fetishisation of this shoe, this two-tone colour scheme is a rare reissue. Not to be confused with Union LA’s recent collab, inspired by the Argon, nor the Dark Marina Blue, known as the “Reverse Argon”. This is the real deal.

The original EQT93 is something of a cult favourite from adidas’ much-celebrated core sports subline, which marked its 30th birthday last year. With Mr Louis Sullivan’s “form follows function” ethos of industrial design in mind, the EQT imprint was conceived as a collection of stripped-back pieces that provided only what athletes needed to excel and nothing more. The running shoe was perhaps the perfect distillation of this. We say perfect, but there’s always room for improvement, right? Here, cutting out what is unnecessary has been taken to its logical endpoint with chunks of the upper removed to produce a sporty sandal. Underpinned with the original sole and Torsion support unit, this update features Velcro straps with leather details and a breathable mesh upper that’s made with sustainable PRIMEGREEN materials.

Way back in the late 1960s when it was first unleashed on the basketball court, the Superstar was little short of a paradigm shift, tearing up the blueprint for what was expected from a sports shoe. That it was inevitably supplanted by the next generation of basketball sneaker, however, was not the end of the story. The flagship adidas model enjoyed a second career as the chosen footwear of the hip-hop culture emerging out of New York in the 1980s. It is this later path that today the shoe is probably best known for, held aloft by Run DMC and their contemporaries. And that era is what this iteration, updated in a plush grey-white leather, celebrates.