That’s thanks, in part, to celebrity adherents like Frank Ocean, A$AP Rocky, Bella Hadid, and Hailey Bieber. “It's literally the don't-think-about-it shoe.”īest of luck getting your hands on the latest Adidas x Wales Bonner Sambas Adidas Originals by Wales Bonner / Jalan and Jibril Durimelĭean now shows off his Sambas on TikTok, where he’s had a front row seat to the sneaker’s explosion into a full-on viral Internet trend. “It's versatile, but it's also a recognizable silhouette for a lot of people,” Dean says. When another round dropped earlier this summer, Dean jumped on a white and green suede pair. “I’ve been into smaller brands like Wales Bonner for a while, so I was reintroduced to the Samba on a fashion level and instead of on a purely functional level,” says Dean, who missed out on a coveted brown pair from the collab that now sell for many hundreds of dollars on the secondary market. If the Samba had already begun to catch back on, now it was truly primed for takeoff. Then, in 2020, Adidas Originals collaborated with one of the hottest rising stars in fashion, Grace Wales Bonner, on a line of Sambas with subtle crochet detailing.
Dean is by no means a sneakerhead-when he moved to New York from Oregon several years ago, his footwear rotation consisted of boots, loafers, and derbies. To 24-year-old Tanner Dean, the Samba represents something of a holy menswear grail. They're just a beautiful shoe that isn't too tech-y or futuristic.” “They look great with shorts, they look great with pants. “I never lost affection for just how it looks,” Hill said. “I would wear them from when I was super into soccer when I was nine or 10, and then through skateboarding.” Hill, who in the past few years has served as a style avatar for young men dipping their toes into menswear, found that the Samba fit neatly into his new tasteful sensibility. “I’ve worn since probably I was 11 or something-it's always been my favorite shoe,” he told GQ at the time. One of those people was Jonah Hill, who designed his own pair of Sambas for Adidas in 2020. It’s more of a rekindling than a reaction,” Bradley says. They’d be like, Oh, I forgot, I used to have a pair of those for soccer practice. “The thing about wearing the shoe, especially when it’s not on trend, is people remember it. Over the years, he realized that the understated Samba evoked a particularly strong-even emotional-response in other people.
“It’s Bob Marley-ish for me,” says Bradley, who has had a pair or two in his footwear rotation since 2004. Fashion stylist Ian Bradley initially recognized the sneaker’s roots in Jamaica’s football-obsessed reggae scene. The new generation of Samba fans have been drawn to this deep well of nostalgia. Perhaps most strikingly, they provided a rare moment of consensus: we all agreed, more or less, on what a cool shoe looked like. In those early summer days, the Samba looked as part of the city’s urban fabric as the Nike Air Force 1. By then, I was seeing Sambas everywhere: on the feet of tourists in Soho, who wear them instead of hefty walking shoes, but also on bankers in Midtown, who have seemingly moved on from Allbirds. We all work in the fashion world, or close to it-but in this case it felt like we were actually late to the party. Earlier this summer, when I met up with a half dozen friends at a downtown NYC bar after work, I counted four sets of Sambas under the table, including my own beat-up white pair, which I bought for about $75 last year. In a men’s fashion landscape riven by flash-in-the-pan microtrends and TikTok-engineered memes, the Samba trend is pleasantly real and surprisingly universal. Which made it particularly surprising that this summer belonged to an unassuming mass market sneaker developed over 70 years ago: the Adidas Samba. The ruthless logic of hype dictates that the harder a sneaker is to get, the more desirable it is. In the sneaker world, popularity is often directly correlated with newness and rarity.
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