A single Adidas track jacket made in West Germany during the 1970s currently lists for $36 on eBay, while a complete matching tracksuit from the brand’s ATP Keyrolan line is priced at $324.99 in the same marketplace search. That spread is the clearest sign of what’s happening to vintage Adidas Originals right now: the category has stopped behaving like ordinary secondhand sportswear and started behaving like a collectible with tiers. eBay’s own spring trend data logged a 75% year-over-year jump in searches for striped track pants, and the three stripes are doing most of the pulling.

Two Bottles of Whiskey and a Trademark

The three stripes weren’t born as a marketing flourish; they were a functional shoe reinforcement that became one of sportswear’s most recognized trademarks almost by accident. Adidas founder Adolf Dassler had the company registering stripe designs on footwear as early as 1949, and by 1952, following that year’s Olympics, Adidas formally acquired the rights to the three-stripe branding from the Finnish manufacturer Karhu Sports, which had been using a similar mark on its own shoes, according to the history compiled on Wikipedia’s entry on the three stripes. The purchase price, by that account, was two bottles of whiskey and the equivalent of roughly €1,600. What started as a way to stabilize a shoe’s upper became, over the following decades, the single most licensed visual signature in performance apparel, stamped down the arms and legs of tracksuits worn everywhere from Olympic training grounds to city sidewalks. The company layered on its trefoil logo in 1972, a mark that reigned as the primary Adidas symbol for roughly a quarter-century and now functions as its own shorthand for a specific manufacturing era, which is why collectors treat a trefoil-and-stripes tracksuit as an older, generally more desirable catch than later stock built around the brand’s later “three bars” mark.

The Deal That Moved the Stripes off the Track

Tracksuits stayed mostly athletic equipment until a single 1986 concert rewired what the three stripes meant culturally. Run-D.M.C. released “My Adidas” that May on the album Raising Hell, and on July 19, 1986, the group’s co-manager Lyor Cohen invited Adidas executive Angelo Anastasio to a Madison Square Garden show where the group asked the crowd to hold up their Adidas gear mid-song, a moment documented on Wikipedia’s page on “My Adidas”. The stunt led directly to what that account describes as the first endorsement deal ever struck between a musical act and an athletic company, a template that hip-hop and sportswear brands have repeated for four decades since. Rolling Stone later placed the song sixth on its list of the 50 greatest hip-hop songs of all time, part of a critical consensus that treats the Madison Square Garden moment as the point where stadium shows, platinum records and brand endorsement deals stopped being exceptional for rap acts and started being routine.

What’s Actually Selling, and for How Much

That crossover history is exactly what current resale listings lean on. A vintage-clothing valuation guide covering 30 collectible brands notes that “vintage Adidas tracksuits, trefoil logo tees, and early Originals pieces sell well,” pricing the category between roughly $20 and $150-plus, with pieces manufactured in West Germany commanding a premium over later production runs, per Underpriced AI’s vintage brand guide. Individual eBay listings back that range up and then blow past it for the right piece: an ATP Keyrolan track jacket made in the USA with a full trefoil and three-stripe design was listed at $149.99, and a Ventex-manufactured red tracksuit from the 1970s made in Tunisia sold in the low-to-mid $70s. A complete ATP Keyrolan set in a rarer navy-beige-cream colorway reached $249.99. eBay’s own spring 2026 trend report separately logged a 6% year-over-year rise in track jacket searches specifically, a smaller but steady number that points to sustained, compounding demand rather than a single viral spike. Buyers also chase specific pop-culture tie-ins over generic vintage: one full tracksuit styled after the Adidas gear Sylvester Stallone wore as Rocky Balboa in the 1985 film Rocky IV was listed at $1,599.99, a price gap wide enough to show that provenance and story, not just decade and stripe count, now drive the very top of the market.

A Uniform That Kept Its Meaning

What separates the Adidas tracksuit from a generic thrift find is that its cultural value was never retrofitted onto it after the fact. It was designed for a track, adopted by a movement, and worn as a status symbol before resale platforms existed to price any of that. Buyers hunting West Germany tags and ATP Keyrolan labels today are paying, in hard dollars, for a lineage that runs from a 1952 whiskey trade straight through a 1986 stage in Queens.