Wales Bonner Put the Crocodile Leather on the One adidas Shoe She Designed Herself

adidas Originals and Wales Bonner release their Fall/Winter 2026 collection on October 29, and the heaviest material in it lands on the Karintha. The dark brown pair wraps the entire upper in high-gloss crocodile-stamped leather, sets black leather Three Stripes over the top of it, and finishes the lace row in brushed gold. It is also the one shoe in the collection that Grace Wales Bonner drew herself rather than pulling it out of the adidas archive.

The Karintha arrived in 2025, several years into a partnership built almost entirely on reworking adidas property. Sambas, Gazelles and Superstars had already passed through the Wales Bonner studio by then, each one usually landing in a quieter colorway and a better leather than the general-release version, and each one trading on a shape the buyer already recognized. The Karintha broke that pattern. It is not a retro and it is not a makeup of an existing model. The profile is low and flat in the way the adidas Tokyo is low and flat, the stitched-down Three Stripes borrow from the Samba, and the whole thing rides a thin gum-toned cup sole with a Trefoil pressed into the tread. The name comes from Jean Toomer’s 1923 book Cane, where Karintha is the woman in the opening passage. Wales Bonner has worked in that register from the beginning, European sportswear read through a Black Atlantic lens, and the Karintha is where the reference finally attached itself to a shape instead of to a colorway or a hangtag.

What adidas has done here is hand the whole upper to one material and then refuse to interrupt it. The brown reads almost black in shadow and turns red where light catches the scales, a glossy crocodile stamp running unbroken from toe to heel with no panel seam cutting across it. The Three Stripes are black leather, stitched down with a serrated edge rather than laid on flat, so from across a room they register as a change in texture before they register as branding. The eyelets are the only hardware on the shoe and they are brushed gold, warm enough to pull the red out of the leather around them. A small gold Trefoil sits high on the heel with a debossed WB directly beneath it. The lining and the sockliner are navy, visible only from directly above and only with the shoe off the foot. Flat black laces, a brown gum-toned cup sole and a Trefoil worked into the tread pattern finish it. Harley Weir shot the campaign, which adidas says takes its cue from 1980s London.

adidas has let outside designers run exotic material on its shoes before, and not long ago. Brain Dead stamped snakeskin and leopard fur onto a 1970s bowling shoe. The Simone Rocha Climacool went further and changed the closure outright. Those were adidas models in somebody else’s hands, which is also what the Larry June Adistar Control 5 was. What changes here is the shoe underneath the crocodile. Running a stamped hide on a Samba works partly because everybody can picture the plain Samba for comparison, so the material is the only variable in the room. The Karintha has no plain version living in anyone’s memory yet. It is a year old. So this pair asks whether a silhouette with almost no history can carry a luxury treatment on its own, with the archive doing none of the lifting. That is a harder test than it sounds for a partnership that has spent most of a decade proving it can make adidas property look expensive, because making your own property look expensive means the shape has to be worth the hide.

Retailers have the Karintha Croc listed at $220, which puts it at the ceiling of the collection’s footwear next to the Gazelle Croc. The two pony hair BW Army Karinthas and the suede Adizero Adios are listed at $200 apiece, so the crocodile stamp carries the premium over every other finish in the set. adidas published no price of its own that could be read before this went up, so the number here comes from two American stockists that agree on it and on the date. The two croc pairs are the only ones in the collection priced above the rest, and they are also the only two built on a stamped hide, which is a tidier correlation than these collections usually produce.

The adidas Originals by Wales Bonner Karintha Croc, style code KK0733, colorway Dark Brown/Core Black/Gold Metallic, releases October 29 globally through adidas.com, the Confirmed app and select stockists. In the US, Feature and Lapstone and Hammer both have the pair loaded at $220 against an October 29 date. The rest of the Fall/Winter 2026 footwear, the Gazelle Croc in Green Night and the BW Army Karinthas in black and khaki pony hair, lands the same morning.

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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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