Gen-Z despairs as PM’s Samba moment kicks cool into touch
THE bad news was delivered by WhatsApp. “Time to burn my shoes,” a friend messaged yesterday, with a picture of the Prime Minister wearing a box-fresh pair of Adidas Sambas and a dress shirt, his slacks hovering at the top of his ankles. It was taken from an Instagram interview Rishi Sunak gave to promote the National Insurance cut.
This friend has recently purchased a pair of Sambas, a gum-soled plimsoll originally designed as a men’s football shoe that has become phenomenally popular this season, especially among young women.
I welcomed her to the club – I wear mine everywhere and with everything, from suit trousers to dresses, as at 27 I am part of the generation that can barely handle a kitten heel. Sambas are versatile and timeless. Clearly the PM thought so, too.
Now Mr Sunak has inadvertently sounded the death knell for my beloved Sambas. This picture proved the quickest way to torpedo a trend that had seemed unstoppable.
Stephen Doig, The Telegraph men’s style editor, said that the trainer has been “killed off by Rishi in one fell swoop”. Naturally, the sight set X/ Twitter alight. “Thinking of the Adidas Samba community at this difficult time,” tweeted my colleague Ed Cumming. “Absolutely unforgivable,” wrote another. “We had a good run,” said a third.
Originally designed in the 1970s and popular in the 1990s, Sambas became a renaissance sleeper hit among trendy millennial dads and Gen-Z girls on TikTok in 2022. Adidas was so taken aback by the demand that it couldn’t make enough of what has been “shoe of the year” for three consecutive years.
Their unstoppable rise is difficult to parse – the originals are simply a pair of bog-standard black and white gum-soled trainers, available for £90.
There is nothing outstanding about them – they are not dissimilar to other Adidas designs.
Not long ago, Sambas were everywhere – from Rihanna and Harry Styles to Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid. Their ubiquity among 20 and 30-something Londoners is such that on any given Tube journey I might spot 10 pairs in the wild.
But Mr Sunak has done for the Samba silhouette what Liz Truss and Nadine Dorries did for the all-white trainer: he has made it criminally – perhaps permanently – uncool.
If herd popularity had dented its success, Mr Sunak’s Sambas are the kiss of death. Luckily, I had foresight to snap up a pair of old-school Adidas Spezials, which are still cool – until they’re spotted on Sir Keir Starmer.