INVINCIBLE’s Samba Dress Shoes Lose the Gum Sole and Gain a Stacked Heel

The third shoe in INVINCIBLE’s adidas Consortium capsule stops being a sneaker somewhere around the sole. It is an all-black Samba carrying wingtip brogue perforations the length of the Three Stripes, gold foil lettering on both sides, and a flat leather sole with a small block heel under the back of it. INVINCIBLE calls it the Samba Dress Shoes, plural, which is its own quiet joke. The capsule arrives November 13, and the photographs of this pair say something the product copy does not.

The Samba is the oldest shoe adidas still sells in volume and the one whose history gets compressed hardest. The origin is 1950, built for play on frozen ground, and that is the date every feed repeats. The shoe people actually wear is the 1972 redesign, where the three-zone profile outsole arrives and the modern proportions get set. The gum sole that now reads as definitively Samba belongs to that later shoe rather than demonstrably to the 1950 original, which is worth keeping straight at the exact moment a collaborator starts rebuilding the bottom of it. For most of the intervening decades the Samba’s job was to be cheap, flat and close to indestructible. For the last three years it has been the engine of adidas’ turnaround, the pair in every window on every high street, and that saturation is the context for everything collaborators are now doing to it. When a silhouette is everywhere, the only places left to differentiate are the parts nobody used to touch.

This one touches them. The style code is HQ0765. The upper is black leather worked with classic wingtip perforations and pinked edges, so the brogue pattern runs straight through the Three Stripes instead of politely around them. A metallic gold INVINCIBLE logo sits on one lateral side and a matching gold SAMBA on the other. The T-toe overlay survives, and it is the one element keeping the shoe legible as a Samba at a glance. Underneath, the gum is gone. The sole frame shows a natural tan leather forepart carrying an embossed Trefoil, black at the toe and heel, with stitching running the perimeter, and the profile frames show a small stacked block heel that no Samba has ever worn. Then there is the back of the shoe. INVINCIBLE describes a ruched heel, flexible gathered detailing that moves naturally with every step. In the photographs it is not moving. It is folded flat and worn down like a mule, in both profile frames and the overhead pair shot. The rear frame shows a Trefoil embossed into the gathered leather at the heel, and the top-down view shows a pale natural leather footbed sitting inside an otherwise entirely black shoe.

That gap between the copy and the camera is the most interesting thing in the release. A gathered heel that flexes is a comfort feature. A gathered heel photographed crushed in every single frame is a styling instruction, and INVINCIBLE is telling buyers how it wants the shoe worn without writing it down anywhere. Whether it survives a season of real wear is a fair question, because a collapsed heel counter is normally what a shoe looks like after you have wrecked it rather than before. The larger point is where the capsule spends its effort. adidas has spent three years letting collaborators change the Samba’s materials, its colors, its tongue and its collar, and the result is a thousand near-identical shoes wearing different skins. INVINCIBLE changed the last and the sole. That is the riskier edit, and it is the same instinct that produced the Five Ten-soled Samba earlier this autumn.

INVINCIBLE lists the Dress Shoes at NT$8,200 on its own global store, against NT$4,890 for the Khaki and Brown lows in the same capsule. That is roughly a seventy percent premium inside a single release, and what it buys is the leather sole, the stacked heel and the brogue work rather than the collaboration badge, since all three pairs carry that equally. No US figure has been published for the adidas CONFIRMED side yet, so there is nothing to convert against. A general-release Samba OG sits near the bottom of adidas’ lifestyle ladder, which puts this pair in a different category of object and prices it accordingly. The brogue detailing is the tell either way.

The INVINCIBLE x adidas Consortium capsule releases November 13 through adidas Originals channels and the CONFIRMED app, per Sneaker Bar Detroit, which is the only outlet carrying a date. INVINCIBLE’s own raffle is open and closes November 14 at 12 p.m. Taipei time. The Dress Shoes are HQ0765. The two lows are HQ0764 in Khaki and HQ0763 in Brown, both at NT$4,890, and all three are listed with full specs on INVINCIBLE’s global store. An apparel run lands alongside the footwear.

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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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