You can now buy Billie Jean King’s famous blue suede shoes from Battle of the Sexes

Billie Jean King had to fight to wear blue suede shoes during her famous Battle of the Sexes match that she won in 1973 against Bobby Riggs. Now Adidas has turned the silhouette into a lifestyle shoe. Some 90 million people around the world watched King defeat Riggs in the match at Houston’s Astrodome. “I underestimated you,” Riggs told King after she beat him. While Riggs wore a “Sugar Daddy” jacket to the match, King wore a mint dress designed by the designer Ted Tinling, with a blue wristband and blue suede Adidas shoes because she wanted some color. Billie Jean King returns a shot against Bobby Riggs during the Battle of the Sexes match at the Astrodome on September 20, 1973, in Houston. [Photo: Focus on Sport/Getty Images] With the 2026 U.S. Open in full swing, Adidas has reimagined King’s famous shoe as a lifestyle shoe for the first time. Called the Billie Jean King Shoe, it’s selling for $110 a pair. The shoes come with an image of King and her signature on the tongue and the match’s set scores on the back. They come in either blue or off-white. Billie Jean King [Photo: Adidas] “The goal was to preserve the look and spirit of Billie Jean King’s original Blue Suede Shoe while adapting it into a silhouette that could live naturally in today’s lifestyle footwear landscape,” an Adidas spokesperson tells Fast Company. King said in a statement that the shoe will always represent more than one match. “They remind me of the progress we’ve made, but also of the work that is still ahead of us,” she said. “I hope bringing them back inspires the next generation to keep pushing for equality and to use their voices to create positive change.” [Photo: Adidas] King donated her pair to the Center for Women’s History in 2016.She said she had to push for it at the time instead of wearing a white shoe. “They didn’t want want me to since we all wore white with blue stripes but I said ‘No, I want color,'” she told Hypebae in 2018. [Photo: Adidas] Adidas released the Blue Suede Shoe as a performance tennis shoe in the 1970s, and it was the German sportswear brand’s first colored velour tennis shoe on the market. More recently, it has brought back the colorway to promote King’s Here to Create Change campaign to encourage young women in sports. In 2018, Adidas released a limited-edition blue-and-white AM4BJK shoe, and held a BJK Your Shoes activation at the U.S. Open to spray paint people’s shoes blue no matter the brand. By bringing back the shoe and colorway in a way new for a wider audience, Adidas is paying homage to the famous shoes and the message they represent for a new generation.

Curated from Fast Company Co.Design. Classified as Culture & Education by AI, which sometimes makes mistakes.

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Bangkok Post Life8/28/2026

You can now buy Billie Jean King’s famous blue suede shoes from Battle of the Sexes

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