The Best Sneakers of 2023 Are All Made by Female Designers — and Impossible to Get

Reports of the death of sneakers have been greatly exaggerated. Sneaker sales are said to be down this year, and yet everywhere you look, everyone’s wearing Adidas Sambas. The humble soccer shoes enjoyed a sort of It-status in the ’90s, and have recently staged a comeback on the feet of our most stylish mononymous celebs (Hailey, Gigi, Bella, Kaia, EmRata). But that’s not the whole story.

In fact, summer 2023 belongs to a slew of very hard-to-get sneaker collaborations between independent female designers and sportswear giants. The British designer Grace Wales Bonner released her first collaboration with Adidas in fall 2020, and each subsequent release has only risen in popularity—in fact, I think she’s at least partly responsible for the Samba renaissance, a style she’s been remixing since that first collaboration.

Buying limited edition collabos requires a que será, será attitude; you make a note on your calendar, you prepare to log on to a website at a determined time, but whether or not that results in a purchase is completely up to a higher power. Interestingly, the Wales Bonner Adidas collections had not been completely impossible to purchase until the arrival, in June, of the spring 2023 metallic silver Sambas with beige crochet embroidery, which the whole world was seemingly waiting for. Friends set alarms to wake up at 4am—their sale time was appropriately UK-based—but it somehow proved not early enough. It was like the sneakers came into the world already sold-out.

The silver Wales Bonner Adidas became not only the shoes of the summer, but status symbols: a sign that the wearer has taste, sure, but also access. Access to someone that can facilitate a purchase, or to really incredible online technology that can beat the bots at the time of purchase. (Other styles from the collection are indeed still available for purchase, but, of course, everyone just wants the silver.)