adidas Samba Fox 'Dark Brown'
Colorway: Dark Brown/Off White/Simple Brown · Style code: H04942 · Release date: March 2021 · Price: $659 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Adidas Samba Fox Tweed Sneakers (H04941)
A wool upper is the rarest material this model has worn. adidas built the Fox version around it, with the colours listed as Dark Brown, Off White and Simple Brown, so the whole shoe sits in a warm textile register that has nothing in common with the leather and suede pairs filling the rest of the catalogue. Wool also changes how the silhouette reads at a glance. It softens the panel edges, absorbs light instead of throwing it back, and makes the flat sole look more substantial by contrast.
It arrived in March 2021 at 100 dollars in the United States, next to a lighter brown make from the same short run. Woollen uppers are a seasonal proposition and a demanding one. They mark easily, they hold water and they cannot be scrubbed, which is why they surface on this shoe only occasionally before vanishing again for years at a stretch. What they give back is warmth and a surface no synthetic convincingly copies. Set against the Samba's football origins, where the brief was hard indoor ground and a sole that would grip on ice, wool is close to the furthest the model has ever been pushed from its original job.