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KITH swaps the Samba’s usual suede and leather for washed denim this fall, continuing a partnership with adidas that is closing in on a decade.
KITH‘s Fall 2026 collection, live now on the brand’s site, includes a version of the adidas Samba built almost entirely from washed denim rather than the shoe’s usual suede and leather. The sil itself dates back to 1949, when adidasfounder Adolf Dassler designed it as a training shoe for players working icy pitches. It has since become the brand’s second best selling model of all time, trailing only the Stan Smith, with more than 35 million pairs sold worldwide over the decades since. That kind of history has made the Samba a favorite target for the material swaps Ronnie Fieg tends to favor on his collaborations, and this one leaves the shape itself untouched. Every bit of the change lives in what the upper is built from.
The pair surfaced publicly inside KITH’s own Fall 2026 lookbook, the seasonal preview the brand typically uses to unveil upcoming footwear tie-ins ahead of a wider release. It appeared there alongside the rest of a season built heavily around denim, leather and mixed textures, including reworked versions of KITH’s Nyx and Dario jackets and a run of jeans in new seasonal washes. Neither KITH nor adidas has issued a formal statement introducing the shoe on its own, so the lookbook remains the only confirmed first look at it.
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Early reporting on the shoe does not agree on what, exactly, it is made of. One account describes a two tone denim build in a colorway listed as Bleached White, Light Blue Denim and Gum: bleached white denim running across the side panels and Three Stripes, a lighter wash of blue denim on the T-toe, eyestays, tongue, heel and collar, cream laces, a gum outsole, and gold KITH script embroider in place of the usual Samba branding on the lateral side, with adidas’ trefoil left alone on the tongue.
adidas · MARKENIT · KITH
A second, separately reported early look describes something closer to KITH’s past denim and pony hair work instead: light blue denim confined to the T-toe, lace panel and heel tab, tan pony hair standing in for the Three Stripes, an off-white or khaki canvas covering the rest of the side panels and heel, a KITH script logo placed on the lateral ankle collar rather than the side panel, and a dark brown midsole finishing things off. Both descriptions agree the shoe is a Samba built from denim and debuted in KITH’s Fall 2026 lookbook. They do not agree on the specific materials beyond that, and with no official product photography published yet, it is not possible to say which account matches what actually ships, or whether both descriptions refer to two separate colorways inside the same rel.
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The KITH x adidas Samba “Denim” is set to release August 31, 2026, through KITH in store and online, in unisex sizing. As of this writing, the pair had not yet appeared among KITH’s live Fall 2026 footwear listings, which tracks with a rel still a day out. Pricing and a style code have not been announce by either brand. Both typically surface once a KITH adidas release goes live on the brand’s own site, which is usually the first place a pair like this becomes available to actually buy.
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This would not be KITH’s first pass at pairing denim with pony hair for adidas. In September 2025, Fieg teased a reworked adidas Supernova Indoor, a 1990s soccer trainer, rebuilt with a Samba Millennium sole, washed denim and off-white canvas panels across the upper, pony hair stripes on the lateral side, chain-stitched stripes on the medial side, and wavy navy nubuck wrapping around the shoe. He introduced the release himself in an Instagram video, calling it “coming soon, super small quantities,” and noted a second colorway done in black pony hair that he said was his personal favorite of the two.
The pony hair and canvas account of the new Samba lines up closely with that Supernova Indoor colorway, sharing the same basic material pairing of washed denim, off-white canvas and pony hair Three Stripes. The all denim account, by contrast, reads as a more stripped down variation on the same seasonal idea, trading the pony hair and canvas for a second, lighter wash of denim instead. Either way, the Samba Denim continues a run of denim-focused releases between the two brands rather than introducing an entirely new idea.
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KITH, founded by Ronnie Fieg in New York in 2011, has built one of streetwear’s longest-running relationships with adidas. The two brands released their first joint soccer-focused capsule in 2017, spanning kits, tracksuits and sneakers, and have kept up a steady run of joint output ever since. That has included a Messi-focused adidas Football collection, a shared “8th Street” label with Clarks that folds adidas into hybrid formulations, and, just this past spring, a Kith Classics for adidas Originals collection that revived the BW Army, Samba and Japan silhouettes across four seasonal colorways.
The Samba Denim keeps that run going into fall, arriving as one of several adidas-linked pieces inside a Fall 2026 season otherwise built around outerwear, shirting and separate collaborative capsules with the NFL and Japanese label Needles. Whichever build turns out to match the shipping shoe, it lands as KITH’s latest attempt to reintroduce one of adidas’ oldest shapes through a new set of materials rather than a new silhouette altogether.
