The wooden chest came first, and the shoe followed. Superkicks' latest collaboration with adidas Originals didn't start with a colorway or a co-branding logic — it started with a specific object: the peti, a handcrafted wooden chest passed down through generations of Indian families, used to store photographs, letters, and jewelry. What the project sets out to recreate isn't the chest's outward form, but the texture and feeling of the moment it's opened.
The Samba's own story needs no dressing up — born as a football boot in the 1950s, it went on to wind its way through skate culture, terrace culture, music scenes, and fashion circles, long since becoming a shoe that's outgrown the pitch. Superkicks uses this as its entry point, linking the private, inherited memory of Indian households to the already-public cultural trajectory the Samba has traveled.
Design-wise, the upper mixes leather and suede, leaning toward a thick, understated texture that echoes the worn feel a wooden chest picks up over time. Metal detailing is added elsewhere on the shoe, nodding to the jewelry and hardware often found inside such chests — it's the one part of the shoe that reads as "shiny," with everything else deliberately kept muted.
This isn't a literal, one-to-one translation of "turning a wooden chest into a shoe." Superkicks and adidas Originals are instead borrowing the function and emotional weight of the peti — collecting, preserving, passing on — to redescribe the Samba silhouette's own staying power. This "Heirloom" is conceived as a shoe you can wear now, and hand down to the next generation later.
The Superkicks x adidas Originals Samba "Heirloom" will release at Concepts (UAE), Shopigo (Turkey), The Good Life (UAE), Carnival (Thailand), amos (Tokyo), and DSM Japan. Pricing and an exact release date have not yet been announced.
