Adidas x Wales Bonner

Adidas x Wales Bonner

Grace Wales Bonner launched her own label in London in 2014, straight out of Central Saint Martins, and began collaborating with Adidas Originals in 2020. That partnership took the archival Samba, a 1949 football shoe, and reworked it season after season in crochet, pony hair and metallic leather until Lyst named it 2023's shoe of the year.

Shoes

The Samba is the throughline of this whole collaboration: the same low-slung 1949 football silhouette, run through a rotating set of material ideas rather than reinvented from scratch. Crochet stripes, pony hair panels and metallic leather have each had a turn, and this grid is where those experiments actually live, on the shoe that started the whole conversation. It is less a sneaker release than a running commentary on one archive piece.

More from the collection

Wales Bonner's work with Adidas extends past footwear into tracksuits, polos and outerwear built on the same instinct: take a sportswear staple and slow it down with craft. The pieces here read as the connective tissue around the shoes, referencing the same Jamaican-British reference points that anchor her namesake label. It is sportswear with its guard down.

Our honest take

Our honest take is that this collaboration has earned its longevity: five years is a long run for a designer partnership with a sportswear giant, and the reason it has lasted is that Wales Bonner keeps changing the material story instead of just recoloring the same shoe. The risk now is oversaturation, since a shoe this photographed eventually stops feeling like anyone's discovery. Buy it for the craft in the details, not because it is everywhere this season.