Wales Bonner’s Green Gazelle Is Named for a Snake, and adidas’ Own Copy Says Crocodile

adidas Originals and Wales Bonner put a deep green reptile-stamped Gazelle into their Fall/Winter 2026 collection, out October 29, and gave it a name that fights with its own press copy. The release calls the shoe a Snake. The paragraph underneath calls the material crocodile. Retailers loading the pair have settled on Croc. Nobody involved appears to have looked at the photographs, which show a third thing.

The Gazelle is one of the oldest shapes adidas still sells and one of the few it has never had to reinvent. It started in the 1960s as a training shoe, built in suede at a moment when the alternative was canvas, and it was later rebuilt as a low indoor model for handball courts. That indoor version is the one most people picture now, with the thin gum sole, the Trefoil pivot pattern pressed into the tread and a last cut longer and flatter than the standard Gazelle. It has spent the last three years as one of the most copied silhouettes in the industry, and adidas has been feeding that run hard, including a Bad Bunny Gazelle Indoor in Solar Gold earlier this month. That saturation is the reason a collaborator reaching for a Gazelle now has to do something to it. Wales Bonner has worked across the adidas terrace catalogue for years, usually by changing the material rather than the pattern, and the Gazelle was always going to come around eventually.

Here the entire upper is green, a scaled leather stamp in the colorway adidas lists as Green Night, with cream leather Three Stripes laid over it and a cream heel overlay edged in a visible hand-worked blanket stitch. Royal blue runs through the lining, the tongue and the sockliner, where a Trefoil sits under the Wales Bonner name. The tongue label is debossed rather than printed. Laces are dark green and round. The gum midsole carries a cream adidas Trefoil at the forefoot, and the outsole keeps the indoor Trefoil tread. The scale pattern itself is small and fine, closer to lizard or snake than to the large plates on the crocodile Karintha in the same collection, so the two croc-named shoes in this drop are not wearing the same hide. The brand’s copy and the brand’s photography disagree here, and the photographs are the ones that will be on shelves. Neither reading changes what the shoe is, but a buyer comparing the two green and brown pairs on a product page is going to notice that only one of them has crocodile scaling on it.

That naming slip is worth more than a pedantic correction, because it says something about how these collections get assembled. A stamped exotic is now a default move rather than an idea. adidas has run leopard fur and snakeskin on a 1970s bowling shoe with Brain Dead, it is running crocodile on two shoes in this one collection, and the material has become generic enough that the people writing the release can reach for the wrong reptile without anybody catching it. The Gazelle survives that because the shape is strong enough to carry almost any finish, which is also why it keeps getting handed out. The cream whipstitched heel is the detail doing the actual work on this pair, and it is the one thing on the shoe that no general-release Gazelle will have. It is also the detail that connects the green pair to the rest of the collection, because the woven cord Three Stripes on the suede Adios and the stitched edges here come out of the same craft register. Wales Bonner has always been better at hand-finishing than at exotics, and the collection is strongest where the two are on the same shoe.

Retailers have the green pair listed at $220, which ties it with the brown Karintha Croc at the ceiling of the collection’s footwear. The two pony hair BW Army pairs and the suede Adizero Adios are listed at $200 each. adidas published no price of its own that could be read before this went up, so the figure comes from stockist listings rather than from the brand. A general-release Gazelle Indoor sits far below all of it, which is the whole proposition of the line, and the reptile stamp is where the premium is going.

The adidas Originals by Wales Bonner Gazelle, style code KK0735, listed in Crystal Sky/Green Night-Power Blue, releases October 29 globally through adidas.com, the Confirmed app and select stockists. The rest of the Fall/Winter 2026 footwear lands the same morning: the brown Karintha Croc, the cream suede Adizero Adios, and the BW Army pairs in black and khaki pony hair. Harley Weir shot the campaign, which adidas says takes its cue from 1980s London.

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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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