Wales Bonner x adidas Samba 'Black'
Colorway: Core Black/Cream White/Core Black · Style code: FX7517 · Release date: November 20, 2020 · Price: $1016 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Adidas Wales Bonner Sailor Jacket (JM8217) · Adidas Wales Bonner Quilted Jacket (KE9956SHAMAR) · Wales Bonner x adidas Samba 'Scarlet' (GY6612) · Adidas x Wales Bonner Shorts 'White' (KR8773) · adidas x Wales Bonner Anorak 'Black' (HE6624)
Grace Wales Bonner is an English designer, born in 1990, who founded her London label in 2014 and won the LVMH Young Designer Prize two years later. Her work with adidas began in 2020, and the Samba was the shoe it started on. This first pair is leather, with the colours recorded as Core Black and Cream White, a restrained opening statement that leaves the model's outline intact rather than redrawing it. The United States price was 180 dollars, more than double what a general-release Samba cost that year.
It released on 20 November 2020 next to a cream and brown make, and the two of them are why the partnership matters to this model's history. The Samba at that point was a steady catalogue product with a football and terrace past and very little fashion heat; within three years it was one of the most visible shoes in the world, and these releases arrived at the front of that shift. The collaboration has since run to dozens of sneakers, and the designer also works with adidas on kits for the Jamaican Football Federation. Everything that followed, the pony hair uppers, the embossed leathers, the studded pairs, is measured against this black one.