One of those people was Jonah Hill, who designed his own pair of Sambas for Adidas in 2020. It’s more of a rekindling than a reaction,” Bradley says.

They’d be like, Oh, I forgot, I used to have a pair of those for soccer practice.

“The thing about wearing the shoe, especially when it’s not on trend, is people remember it. Over the years, he realized that the understated Samba evoked a particularly strong-even emotional-response in other people. “It’s Bob Marley-ish for me,” says Bradley, who has had a pair or two in his footwear rotation since 2004. Fashion stylist Ian Bradley initially recognized the sneaker’s roots in Jamaica’s football-obsessed reggae scene. The new generation of Samba fans have been drawn to this deep well of nostalgia. Perhaps most strikingly, they provided a rare moment of consensus: we all agreed, more or less, on what a cool shoe looked like. In those early summer days, the Samba looked as part of the city’s urban fabric as the Nike Air Force 1. By then, I was seeing Sambas everywhere: on the feet of tourists in Soho, who wear them instead of hefty walking shoes, but also on bankers in Midtown, who have seemingly moved on from Allbirds. We all work in the fashion world, or close to it-but in this case it felt like we were actually late to the party. Earlier this summer, when I met up with a half dozen friends at a downtown NYC bar after work, I counted four sets of Sambas under the table, including my own beat-up white pair, which I bought for about $75 last year. In a men’s fashion landscape riven by flash-in-the-pan microtrends and TikTok-engineered memes, the Samba trend is pleasantly real and surprisingly universal. Which made it particularly surprising that this summer belonged to an unassuming mass market sneaker developed over 70 years ago: the Adidas Samba. The ruthless logic of hype dictates that the harder a sneaker is to get, the more desirable it is. In the sneaker world, popularity is often directly correlated with newness and rarity.

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