Scroll through street-style imagery captured over the last four years and you’ll see Wales Bonner’s Adidas Originals trainers crop up time and again. From the retro SL72s, to the covetable shiny silver Sambas from one of the more recent drops – a favourite of British Vogue’s head of editorial content, Chioma Nnadi – the designer has released numerous sellout trainer styles during her ongoing partnership with the sportswear giant.
Dating back to autumn/winter 2020, when Wales Bonner’s takes on Adidas’s three-stripe tracksuits and “the kind of Adidas trainers Bob Marley would have worn” were seen on the runway for the first time, the union has become a vehicle for Wales Bonner’s rich references to come to life. “It was amazing to get into the archive with Adidas, and really study how it has been interpreted by different cultures across times,” Wales Bonner said of her inaugural collection with Adidas, which was inspired by 1970s literary and musical touch-points and her Jamaican heritage.
“While the first collection was about viewing the Caribbean community from a British-centric perspective, this one is thinking about a similar community in a completely different place,” Wales Bonner told Vogue of her following spring/summer 2021 collection, Essence. “I was interested in British clothes that ended up in the Caribbean and were transformed by how people put them together and their context.” Alongside narrow-cut track pants and cropped tailored jackets, the offering featured updates of Adidas’s Samba and Nizza silhouettes in new colourways and intricate flairs like leather stripes and crochet laces, inspired by archive imagery of dancehall musicians. “What I do is quite subtle, but it’s about attention to detail.”
It is this attention to detail that has catalysed the success of her subsequent reinterpretations of archive Adidas styles: the Japan (autumn/winter 2021), the Country and Samba (spring/summer 2022), the Gazelle (autumn/winter 2022), a knitted take on the SL72 and two more Sambas (spring/summer 2023) and additional fresh Sambas for autumn/winter 2023, realised in leopard print, and nylon and suede.
“A major part of this success is because Wales Bonner’s sportswear inspiration works perfectly with Adidas’s brand,” remarks Drew Haines, director of merchandising at StockX, who notes high demand on the secondary market. Any seasoned buyer will know that the majority of Wales Bonner’s Adidas trainers enter the resale realm almost immediately after their release, given fervid interest and limited production quantities. Occasionally, they’ll be restocked on multi-brand retailers, like Matches and Farfetch, only to sell out again as word spreads.
Set your alarms for upcoming drops (no confirmed date of yet), which promises a replica of the Adidas Neftegna worn by Haile Gebrselassie when he won the Berlin Marathon in 2008 for spring/summer 2024 and croc-embossed Superstars for autumn/winter 2024. Let Wales Bonner’s enduring influence on the sneaker space (and fashion) long continue.
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