The desperation of dropping your rent check on a middle-school beater shoe has created something of an existential crisis for the everyman Samba wearer. I wore and was obsessed with them back in 2003, when the classic (the best ones IMO) cost $60.” One commenter on Reddit-thread bashing Peters’ purchase spelled out the anxiety in full: “I hate the fact that Gen Z claims the Samba trend. The TikTok fashion influencer Audrey Peters, in a not-so-cool flex, posted a video showing off two pairs of green Sporty & Rich Sambas that cost her $500 a pair. Take a quick look at StockX, the sneaker resale site, and you’ll easily find Wales Bonner Sambas routinely fetching over $600 a pair. Pharrell’s Humanrace just dropped an Ecco-leather Samba in a range of bright monochromes.Īnecdotes about obscene resale prices don’t lessen the complications. More collabs are incoming: WASP-leisure brand Sporty & Rich plans to unveil a second capsule of pastel-motif Sambas in the coming weeks. Back in March, Kith collaborated with Clarks on a crepe-sole Samba, and a second summer release boasting Clarks suede on the shoes is being teased now. Teaser images of a cream and brown Samba with a fold-over tongue have been making the rounds. The aforementioned Wales Bonner drop, the collaboration credited with resuscitating this specific Samba trend cycle, is due shortly, and sneaker sites are counting down the days. “It’s the biggest Adidas moment since Yeezy.”įor a trend that should, theoretically, cool any minute now, there’s still a lot of activity on the horizon. “The original Samba is selling more and more, week over week,” Dunn-Pilz said.

Most popular? The OG classic and vegan Sambas.ĭavidde Dunn-Pilz, Stadium Goods’ commercial operations manager, told me the customers driving this phase of the trend skew towards “Gen Z” and “TikTokers”-groups, he believes, that want to keep up with the trend, but might not have the funds for the more expensive Samba collabs. Sneaker retailer Stadium Goods reported that their Samba sales have grown tenfold since last fall alone, with this April marking the highest number of Samba sales in the retailer’s history. The current resale numbers also bear out the thesis. The demand for the shoe has had a hectic energy, unsettling the older Samba wearers who still see it as a trusty, low-cost beater sneaker. Maybe less beaten to death and more trampled in a stampede. Hailey Bieber sporting a pair of vegan Sambas earlier this year. CEO Bjørn Gulden declared on a March earnings call that the Samba was the “hottest shoe on the market,” and that the company intends to sell “millions and millions'' of pairs by “heating up” the sneaker franchise quarter over quarter. Adidas itself has signaled its plans to fan the flames on their 76-year-old design, a needed source of profit as the company looks to fill a $2 billion hole post Yeezy. Hundreds of millions of TikTok views tallied under #adidassamba, and Shanghai played host to a Samba-only pop-up this spring. The $100-dollar black OG Sambas, and its vegan counterpart, were reportedly sold out, for a time, on the Adidas website. The Samba closed out 2022 as one of the hottest items in fashion, leading to a shortage earlier this year. One afternoon this past week, at the intersection of Prince Street and Broadway in Soho, I observed white vegan Sambas being worn, simultaneously, by young New Yorkers on all four corners. The Samba’s popularity is still surging with no signs of slowing down. What’s perplexing about the Samba moment is its persistence. That the Samba will be the “It” shoe of this approaching summer-as it was last summer and the one before it-seems to be a given. We’re in the calm, pre-summer days before a string of coveted collaborations for the ever-versatile soccer sneaker are set to drop (including a sixth linkup with Wales Bonner, expected in early June). Right now might be the moment to address the subject behind one of the more perplexing trend cycles bestowed on us in recent memory: the Adidas Samba.

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