Samba Espadrille Is Not What adidas Calls CLOT’s Three New Pairs

CLOT’s espadrille Samba came back on June 18 in black, green and a pale purple, sold first through Edison Chen’s own JUICE stores before adidas.com picked it up. The wrinkle is in the name. adidas does not call any of these the Samba Espadrille. Its own product title is CLOT Samba by Edison Chen, and the espadrille part is shorthand the sneaker press attached to the sole and then made permanent.

The Samba is one of the oldest things adidas still sells, and the brand’s own accounts do not fully agree on when it started. adidas’s blog dates it to 1950 and a German team that needed something to train on frozen ground. The version repeated more often, also attributed to adidas, is 1949. Both describe the same purpose, a football trainer with a gum sole that would hold on ice, and adidas dates the shoe as it looks today to 1972. An espadrille is a different tradition entirely, a fabric upper on a flexible sole, traditionally finished with a rope braid running around the edge. Putting the two together is CLOT’s idea rather than adidas’s, and it did not start with the Samba. The treatment showed up on a CLOT Stan Smith in July 2025 and on a Gazelle before that. The Samba only got it this spring.

The three June pairs are KI4323, KI4326 and KI4328, and the colorway names in circulation are not adidas’s. What outlets have called Classic Black is Core Black, Cloud White and Core Black on adidas’s own page. Grass Green is Court Green, Warm Vanilla and Core Black. Floral Pink is the one worth flagging, because adidas’s string reads Pearl Amethyst, Cloud White and Pearl Amethyst, and amethyst is a purple. Construction is where the three stop matching each other. CLOT and JUICE describe a suede T-stitched toe cap, gold branding on the tongue tab and CLOT’s woven espadrille footbed across the set, with the black pair built in a lightweight nylon and the Pearl Amethyst pair in a coated leather. Descriptions of the midsole do not agree. CLOT’s own copy and Sneaker Bar Detroit stop at the footbed, while at least one outlet has the rope wrapping the midsole itself. adidas’s product pages load their materials copy through scripts that do not render to a plain fetch, so that detail is not settled in the brand’s own words.

Calling this trio a return is the part most coverage got wrong, and the gap is the story. CLOT, which adidas dates to 2003 and which the South China Morning Post dates to 2004 with its parent company and JUICE founded the year before, released its previous Samba espadrille on May 2. That was KJ0274 in white and black, part of a collection adidas actually named, the Mundial, built on football heritage ahead of a World Cup summer. June 18 is six weeks later. That is not a model coming back after a year away. It is a second wave inside one campaign, tied to what CLOT called its Football Club capsule. The read is that adidas has found a cadence it likes here, shipping small waves in quick succession instead of one dated collaboration a season, and letting JUICE carry the first day in Asia before the shoe reaches adidas.com. It keeps the partnership in front of people for months rather than an afternoon, and it makes any single pair less scarce than the drop rhythm makes it look.

All three are $140, the same as the May white pair and the same as the CLOT Stan Smith espadrille in July 2025. A standard Samba OG is $100 on adidas.com, so the espadrille work carries a $40 premium. Holding one number across three separate releases reads as a deliberate tier rather than a per-project figure, which is not how most collaboration pricing behaves. For comparison inside the same silhouette, the Coca-Cola Samba and the Asphalt Samba both sit in their own bands.

Release details: released June 18, 2026. Style codes KI4323 in Core Black, KI4326 in Court Green and KI4328 in Pearl Amethyst, $140 each, sold under adidas’s product name CLOT Samba by Edison Chen. JUICESTORE.COM opened the evening of June 17 US time, ahead of adidas.com and wider retail.

Where to buy: adidas.com and JUICE.

Read next: The complete 2026 World Cup archive, every match, every goal, and the kit and boot each one was scored in.

Source: Sneaker Bar Detroit

Written by

The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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