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. 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). 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.
What’s perplexing about the Samba moment is its persistence. The Samba’s popularity is still surging with no signs of slowing down. 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 closed out 2022 as one of the hottest items in fashion, leading to a shortage earlier this year. The $100-dollar black OG Sambas, and its vegan counterpart, were reportedly sold out, for a time, on the Adidas website. Hundreds of millions of TikTok views tallied under #adidassamba, and Shanghai played host to a Samba-only pop-up this spring. 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. 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.
But as sales continue to heat and the hype gradually cools—specifically among influencers and trendsetters (a recent Strategist headline offered the verdict: “Sambas are played out.”)—it’s getting more difficult to parse the trend or say exactly what wearing Sambas even means these days. And that struggle to define the meaning of the product appears to be breaking out along generational lines.
New wearers joining the trend (such as the Gen Z masses hoping to imitate the styles of Kaia Gerber, Bella Hadid, Harry Styles, or Kendall Jenner) seem to be displacing the early adopters, blokecore nostalgists, savvy creatives, and generally older Samba fans. It’s gotten a bit complicated, in other words, to wear a simple sneaker. If last year gave us the “Summer of the Samba,” we could say that this summer officially marks the arrival of the Samba’s anxiety era.
On a recent episode of the Throwing Fits podcast, guest Susan Korn—the vegan Samba enthusiast behind the cult New York handbag brand Susan Alexandra—described her attendance at a recent Bret Easton Ellis reading in Manhattan, where she spotted “the Adidas shoe,” as she calls it, on many fellow attendees. For Korn, the encounter inspired a gut-level response along the lines of: “I have to make a change.”
Similarly, one of Korn’s friends, the timepiece pundit Brynn Wallner, told her she wouldn’t be “caught dead” wearing the sneakers. When I asked Wallner about the remark, she admitted that she does on occasion wear Sambas, but that the experience is mostly “soul crushing.”
“I’m always really mortified to have them on,” Wallner said. “Wearing them can feel like you just got off the conveyor belt from the influencer factory. It’s a cute shoe, but it got beaten to death.”
Maybe less beaten to death and more trampled in a stampede. 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. The current resale numbers also bear out the thesis. 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. Most popular? The OG classic and vegan Sambas.
Davidde 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. “The original Samba is selling more and more, week over week,” Dunn-Pilz said. “It’s the biggest Adidas moment since Yeezy.”
For a trend that should, theoretically, cool any minute now, there’s still a lot of activity on the horizon. 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. Teaser images of a cream and brown Samba with a fold-over tongue have been making the rounds. 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. More collabs are incoming: WASP-leisure brand Sporty & Rich plans to unveil a second capsule of pastel-motif Sambas in the coming weeks. Pharrell’s Humanrace just dropped an Ecco-leather Samba in a range of bright monochromes.
Anecdotes about obscene resale prices don’t lessen the complications. Take a quick look at StockX, the sneaker resale site, and you’ll easily find Wales Bonner Sambas routinely fetching over $600 a pair. 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. 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. I wore and was obsessed with them back in 2003, when the classic (the best ones IMO) cost $60.”
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. It’s a measure of just how far the shoe has begun to drift from its roots. By dint of wearing a Samba, these days, are you telling people that you’re the kind of person who throws down 200% over list price for Kith Sambas? Or someone who got them at their listing price before they sold out in a blink? But wait, does that mean you’re the kind of person that wants a pair of shoes so badly you’ll set a notification for the drop?
Manic demand for the small-run collaborative Sambas is an obvious sign that the shoe has evolved into a brightly-colored commodity and, in the case of specific collabs, a new kind of status marker. What feels strange about this evolution, and another possible source of the tension some wearers might be feeling, is that the Samba is, at its core, a wardrobe basic. The functional equivalent of a white t-shirt or blue jeans. It’s the shoe you slide into for a bodega run or a day in the office.
“I call it the one-brain-cell-firing shoe for the thinking man,” said Alex Hartman, the once-anonymous admin behind Instagram’s Nolita Dirtbag. “It’s a perfect background to whatever you’re wearing.” It’s this aspect of the sneaker that is so appealing to a certain corner of the Samba base, or to anyone who enjoys a wardrobe staple.
Except Hartman is now having to fire up a few brain cells to navigate this stage of the Samba trend. Not even the guy making Soho starter packs is immune to its influence. He recently purchased a pair of orange Adidas Campus in an attempt at a kind of 4-D sneaker trend chess move. “By trying to buy a pair of Adidas that aren’t the white or black Sambas, by trying to stay off the beaten path, I’m still being influenced by the trend. There’s no escaping it.”
For creative director Nate Brown, too, the Samba has always been a “simple, humble go-to” for his outings in the city. Having not worn the sneaker since his middle-school days, over two decades ago, he returned to the Samba sometime around 2018, and now uses pairs until they’re thrashed beyond use. “I’ll wear Sambas before a pair of Converse because they’re easier to put on,” he told me.
Like most Samba wearers over the age of 30, Brown remembers the Samba as the black sneaker you wore after soccer practice. Until 2011, in fact, Adidas didn’t offer the shoe in any other colors. Before that, the sneaker had undergone only relatively minor design changes over the prior sixty years. It was introduced as a chunky winter soccer boot in 1950, and in the 1960s the silhouette was sleekened to a gum-soled soccer sneaker, which by the 1990s was being embraced by skateboarders and preps alike. A decade later, in the early 2000s, the Samba began its first nostalgia cycle becoming the “It” shoe of stylists and of rock stars, like Dave Grohl, who were snapping up Sambas for the “soccer look.” Now, thanks to its prominence on social media, the rise of the influencer class, and ultra-abbreviated trend cycles, the Samba that Brown, and shoppers his age, once knew is buried under layers of other associations.
“When I put on Sambas before I walk down Mercer Street, I’m wondering if people are going to be like, ‘Why is this grown man wearing Sambas?”’ Brown told me. “I don’t actually care, but it’s certainly a thought that enters my mind these days.”
What we’re witnessing now is the awkward moment in culture when multiple groups compete over the meaning of one item. A weird little tug of war over the great sidewalk signifier. Who gets to claim ownership of the Sambas? And, more importantly, who will decide when the trend is dead?
“You can’t have rival groups using the same item for long,” explained W. David Marx, a fashion consultant and author of Status and Culture. The book is an effort to explain, among other things, how aesthetic choices and the products we buy construct our identities.
“If you’ve always worn a certain shoe, it’s buried in your identity," Marx told me. “You want people to understand that choice within your story. It’s your thing. But what if, suddenly, the broader meaning behind the shoe changes? Now it doesn’t matter what it means to just you—you have to communicate your history with it to other people.”
To Marx, the real throbbing anxiety of older Samba wearers is wired into the concept of cachet and the perpetual struggle between early and late adopters. That is, early adopters add cachet to a product and they define it, which triggers more people to adopt that product. But as the audience broadens, the cachet inevitably drops and the product becomes associated with the late adopters.
Maybe it’s not so much that the Samba is in its anxiety era but something more like an awkward phase, where no one knows what anyone is trying to express by wearing the shoe. This might all be a larger symptom of a zombified culture where no trend, product, or style ever truly dies off, and no one truly feels in control of what their personal style communicates to others. Adidas, no doubt, is banking on some consumers defaulting back to classic styles amidst the glut of options and the collapse of trend cycles. If you’re looking to reduce your Samba anxiety there’s a course of action to be taken. As Marx told me: “You can abandon the thing you’ve always worn,” he said. “Or keep explaining it to people.”
Somewhere near your front hallway, a cooked pair of Sambas is trembling.
