Trendzilla

This week in strange bedfellows: Stella McCartney and Adolf "Adi" Dassler—get it? Adi-das?—whose year-old collaboration has been on sale for six days now at Adidas' new Sport Performance store in the Irvine Spectrum. Which raises the question: Are there any hoodies or white knee-high boots left for you? Not if New York has anything to do with it.

"It's done amazingly well for us—sold out in New York, and we expect it to do just as well here," says Todd Seidel, Adidas senior retail development manager, on a walk-through just three days before Black Friday. At the moment, the new store is still full of guys in tool belts; in 72 hours, it will be full of, among other things, a collection that suggests the runway model and the running mom can be friends, that couture-meets-sports is not some sort of fashion mutant, and that Stella is making bank—without friend Kate Moss to shill for her even-newer H&M partnership.

"It transcends sport," Seidel says, which is about what you'd expect him to say, even in a store that, with fake stadium benches outside the fitting rooms and three lit-up Adidas stripes that run the depth of the space, is all business about sports. "It's that area between sports, entering into lifestyle. Very couture."

How so? Easy, really: buy two. There are plenty of women, one of the flacks says, who buy two outfits at a time: one to work out in, and one to wear out. In fashion, the line between anything and anything else was blown the minute people—women, mostly—started wearing bustiers for outerwear, making the concept of sportswear as couture comparatively easy to swallow. And the idea of people in New York buying two of the same thing at the same time is hilarious.Even if it means everything out here is on back order.

—Theo Douglas