Adidas Wmns Samba 'Ostrich'
Colorway: Footwear White/Footwear White/Gold Metallic · Style code: BZ0619 · Release date: July 22, 2016 · Price: $2482 · Availability: Available now
Two hundred and forty dollars is an extraordinary figure for a Samba, and the Ostrich name is where it went. adidas logged the colours as Footwear White twice over with Gold Metallic, so the pair reads as a single tone carrying metallic branding rather than the three-colour split the model usually wears. The upper is leather, and the premium sits in its finish rather than in any change to the pattern: the T-shaped toe overlay, the three stripes and the low, flat last are all standard Samba furniture.
It released on 22 July 2016 into a very different market from the one the shoe enjoys now. At that point the Samba was a dependable catalogue seller with a deep football and terrace history but little mainstream fashion pull, and a women's pair at this price was an outlier rather than a signal of anything. The surge of demand that turned the model into one of the most worn shoes in the world was still several years off. That makes this release interesting in hindsight, because adidas was already testing how much finish and price the last could carry, and using the women's size run to find out.