A Samba is just a Samba. It is the season’s silhouette, and despite the changes it has seen throughout its history, its style has managed to crystallise and become timeless. While other models need to be updated every season, the adidas Samba has refined its lines and established them as a pattern to follow.
In contrast to other models, when you think of an adidas Samba, you think of a single design. However, because the Samba is one of adidas’s oldest shoes, it has undergone changes and interpretations that few are aware of and that no one expects: special editions made from Mexican national football team uniforms, with soles designed for automatic bicycle cleats, mixed with Predator lines, or adapted to golf and skateboarding. We went one step further to find the oddest ones.
Adi Dassler registered the adidas trademark in August 1949, and a few months later, the first adidas Samba, a football boot designed for cold climates, went on sale. Its primary functional benefit came from suction-producing holes in the sole.
Samba could be a reference to the 1950 World Cup, which was held in Brazil, an unsuitable location for playing in ice boots. However, according to some official adidas stories, footballers playing on icy surfaces without their Samba seemed to dance to the samba rhythm. Who knows?
The adidas Samba decided that life on the icy football fields was too difficult and retrained as a football model in more pleasant conditions. This was the time when it had two sisters, whom she named Mamba and Bamba.
After learning about the Samba’s winter origins, it is not surprising that adidas turned them into snowboard boots. It is the most advanced Samba yet, with a Continental sole, 3D moulded tongue, and heat mouldable lining, but it stays true to the original.
PROUDER, an exhibition for Pride Month, was organized in 2018 by adidas and ShowStudio. They commissioned various celebrities to reimagine adidas Samba shoes, which would then be auctioned off for charity. The Samba has been made into a collector’s item by Marc Jacobs, David Beckham, Pet Shop Boys, Nick Night, and Pharrell Williams, but we prefer Kate Moss’ creation, which transformed Cinderella’s lost glass slipper into a Samba.
In 2014, brands competed to be the first to develop a new type of shoe construction that promised to revolutionize the way footwear was made. Adidas made a statement with a knit football boot that it hoped to somehow connect to its first outstanding football boot. For this reason, they called it the Samba Primeknit.
Models that are one-of-a-kind and rare, hard-to-find items. The approved versions of the adidas Samba are sold at FOOTDISTRICT.