Where Worlds Collide: adidas TERREX and Mark “Gonz” Gonzales Drop the Shmoofoil Collection
There is a philosophical argument buried inside the adidas TERREX x Shmoofoil collaboration, and it goes something like this: the divide between a concrete curb and a mountain trail is largely invented. Movement is movement. Terrain is terrain. And nobody has spent more of his life proving that point than Mark Gonzales.
The Gonz — as he is universally known — is widely considered one of the pioneers of modern street skateboarding, named the “Most Influential Skateboarder of All Time” by Transworld Skateboarding magazine in 2011, finishing ahead of Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen. What made him revolutionary wasn’t just technical ability — it was perception. Gonzales imagined the unthinkable, began exploring the previously untouched world of handrail skating, and his ability to work transitions inspired people to skate everything. A staircase became a launch ramp. A ledge became a canvas. The whole world was fair game. In 1986, he performed an ollie between a wave-shaped wall and platform at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza — a trick so historically significant that the obstacle has been known as the “Gonz Gap” ever since.
That same restless re-perception of the world never stayed contained to a skateboard. Gonzales has been a prolific art-maker and writer-poet for decades, first showing his work in the early 1990s at Aaron Rose’s legendary Alleged Gallery, and has since been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally. His raw, spontaneous style — expressive linework, dreamlike figures, poetic absurdity — has landed in galleries worldwide, yet remains rooted in skate culture. He’s a category-defying figure: not a skater who also makes art, not an artist who also skates, but something harder to pin down and therefore considerably more interesting.
The new Shmoofoil Collection for adidas TERREX is, in that sense, a perfect fit. At the center of it is the Skychaser GTX, a fully technical hiking shoe built on a GORE-TEX waterproof membrane, engineered for real terrain — not the kind of terrain you admire from a parking lot, but the kind that eats gear. The shoe pairs the agility of a trail runner with the support and durability of a hiking shoe, featuring a LIGHTSTRIKE EVA midsole for cushioning and responsiveness on technical terrain, with a moderate 10mm drop. Gonzales’ hand-drawn Shmoofoil universe finds its way onto the shoe’s insoles, a characteristically understated move — the art is there for you to find, not to perform.
“I’ve always been drawn to where worlds collide,” Gonzales said of the collaboration. “Whether it’s skating or art or the outdoors, it’s all movement, just different surfaces. TERREX builds products that are meant to actually be used and handle real terrain. That mattered to me. I wanted to shape something that performs without compromise, and make sure my world was built into it.”
It’s a statement that cuts to the ethos that’s defined his entire career. Skating, as Gonzales reinvented it, was never about a skatepark — it was about finding possibility in whatever surface existed. TERREX operates in a similar register: the brand’s whole premise is that the outdoors doesn’t start at a trailhead. The Skychaser is explicitly designed for those who move fluidly between concrete and dirt, which happens to describe the trajectory Gonzales has been tracing since the mid-1980s.
Beyond footwear, the Shmoofoil capsule extends into outerwear and apparel, each piece carrying Gonz’s hand-drawn work through reflective detailing, puff print, and screenprint applications — techniques that allow the art to shift depending on light and context, which feels appropriately Gonzales. The collection doesn’t subordinate function to aesthetics or aesthetics to function. Both coexist, neither compromised.
To launch the collection, adidas TERREX partnered with Portland’s Tactics for a community event on March 5, alongside the premiere of a short film shot between the shop and SEEK Skate Camp in Sandy, Oregon. The film follows an adidas team rider moving through city streets, forest trails, and mountain terrain — a visual essay on the premise underlying the entire collection. It is, perhaps, the most literal expression of the idea: one body, moving fluidly through every kind of surface the world offers.
Gonzales has been working with adidas since 1998, a relationship that has produced some of the most enduring collaborative footwear in skate history. But the TERREX partnership takes that relationship somewhere new — into technical outdoor performance, into the mountains, across the same kind of terrain that resists the comfortable categories we try to impose on movement and on people. Which, when you think about it, is exactly where The Gonz has always been.
The adidas TERREX x Shmoofoil Skychaser GTX is available beginning March 6 at adidas.com/mark_gonzales, priced at $170.
