For followers of fashion, they are the ‘must have’ sneaker - or they were, until former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was spotted wearing Adidas Sambas.
Collaborations with famous figures like Lionel Messi, musician Pharrell Williams and supermodel Gigi Hadid have helped make Sambas the German-brand’s biggest sellers.
Now Oasis fans lucky enough to have bagged a ticket for next year’s Murrayfield gigs can add a dash of Scottish heritage to their Britpop uniform of bucket hats, parkas and Adidas three stripe trainers.
New versions of the retro-style Sambas, launched as football shoes in the 1940s, a favourite of Eighties’ skateboarders and today’s Instagram influencers, have been unveiled with an unlikely Hebridean makeover.
The Samba OGs went on sale in the UK featuring the classic sneaker with its leather and nubuck trim, with options of dark brown or light beige Harris Tweed, woven in Hebridean homes and featuring the distinctive herringbone pattern.
Anyone hoping to snare a pair, however, needs to get their skates on: the £120 sneakers sold out in Japan recently, before popping up on resale sites for almost twice the price.
Described by fashion magazine, GQ, as “peak, straight-up grandadcore”, it’s not the first time Sambas have embraced Hebridean tweed.
In 2021, before the style hit its current peak of popularity, Adidas launched ‘Fox’ Samba with a less obvious Harris Tweed pattern. They now fetch upwards of £350 on resale sites.
The latest collaboration has led to a flurry of activity among weavers working in homes dotted around the Outer Hebrides whose hand-woven tweed is sent to Harris Tweed Hebrides, the production mill which has supplied Adidas for the collaboration.
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It’s just the latest major ‘fashion’ moment for Harris Tweed. It featured heavily in the recent Christian Dior Cruise 2025 collection launch at Drummond Castle in Perthshire.
Margaret Macleod, CEO of Harris Tweed Hebrides, the production mill which supplied Adidas with the fabric for the collaboration, says:
“The Adidas collaboration is fantastic.
“For the Dior collection, around ten garments (which used Harris Tweed) were on catwalk.
“It shows how fashion is looking to its suppliers not to be just suppliers but to bring a little bit extra to their collections.”
The Adidas deal has helped boost work for the 200-plus self-employed weavers who are registered with the Harris Tweed Authority.
They work from their own homes across Lewis and Harris, often using heritage looms set up in garages and sheds and working only with British farmed wool in colours dyed to reflect the islands’ landscape.
The raw fibre and finished fabric are handled at the 100-year-old Shawbost Mill on the Isle of Lewis.
The Harris Tweed-Samba mash-up comes as the Gallagher brothers’ reunion reignites demand for Britpop style, potentially fuelling even more demand for the three stripes brand.
It also coincides with the 60th anniversary of the landmark court ruling that ended another long and high-profile feud, which split the Scottish tweed industry.
It led to Harris Tweed becoming the only textile in the world protected by its own Act of Parliament. The name is only allowed to refer to hand-woven tweed made in the Outer Hebrides from 100% pure British virgin wool.
Before then, however, weavers across the country were at loggerheads amid bitter claims of ‘fake tweed’, huge piles of unsold fabric, a clash between an orb and a shield, and even a row involving an ancient clan.
It led to concerns the Stornoway-based weaving industry might collapse, sending islanders packing up in search of new lives elsewhere.
Weaving was a way of life in the Outer Hebrides when, in 1846, Lady Dunmore, the widow of the Earl of Dunmore who owned Harris, requested local weavers recreate a tweed version of the family tartan.
She was thrilled by the results and promoted the homespun tweed among her well-heeled associates who shared her delight with its colours, warmth and weather resistance.
In a remarkable entrepreneurial move for the times, she tapped into rising demand from hunting and shooting estates and grew markets for the tweed in Edinburgh and London.
Her efforts helped establish a bustling cottage industry of weavers with a reputation for the finest tweed.
By the time she died in 1886, Harris Tweed was thriving and Hebridean carding and spinning mills were working at full speed to meet rising orders.
But they were not the only ones making tweed.
Conscious of the rising threat from machine-produced ‘fast’ fabric, the Harris Tweed Association Limited was established in 1910, and a distinctive orb and Maltese Cross emblem was unveiled.
It would be applied to prove tweed that came from yarn spun and woven on the islands.
But producers elsewhere eyed the Harris Tweed Association emblem with concern.
Three mainland tweed producers - Argyllshire Weavers, A&J Macnaughton and Macdonald's Tweeds of Oban, who also had an operation in South Uist - formed the Independent Harris Tweed Producers Ltd.
They claimed the orb emblem and Harris Tweed name was stifling sales of their tweed, leading to confusion among international customers who shunned it, thinking it was fake.
As their fabric piled up, they launched an advertising campaign declaring “A new label, you will only find on authentic Harris Tweed garments, 100% Scottish wool” and their emblem depicting a ram’s head on a shield.
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In a war of words worthy of the feuding Gallaghers, the Stornoway-based Harris Tweed Association retaliated with large adverts featuring their orb emblem: “This, and none other, is the label of genuine, Orb-stamped Harris Tweed”.
Meanwhile, a further issue was bubbling away. Complaints landed on the desk of the Lord Lyon King of Arms claiming the group’s shield too closely resembled the Macdonald coat of arms and was causing offence to clan members around the world.
Matters reached at peak in 1960, with the mainland group’s complaints prompting the Federal Trade Commission of the USA to tell the Harris Tweed Association it had to disclaim exclusive rights to the name.
It sparked fears that machine-produced tweed would overwhelm the Hebridean slow, handmade versions, put skilled weavers out of work, close down Hebridean mills and force islanders to leave.
The two sides finally met at the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and the longest running case in Sottish legal history.
Lord Hunter’s judgment was delivered 60 years ago last month. In order to be properly described as Harris Tweed, he ruled, cloth had to be made from wool dyed, spun, and finished in the Outer Hebrides, hand-woven by islanders at their homes.
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It paved the way for the Harris Tweed Act in 1993 and the Harris Tweed Authority which ensures only bona fide Hebridean tweed bears its mark.
Meanwhile, the Harris Tweed championed by Lady Dunmore has rarely fallen out of fashion: it regularly features on haute couture catwalks and in shoe collaborations with Clarks, Converse, Doc Marten and Manolo Blahnik.
In 2004, sportswear giant Nike approached Donald John Mackay, a lone weaver in Luskentyre requesting tweed from his single-width Hattersley loom for a reboot of their 1980s basketball trainer, The Terminator.
Local weavers produced nearly 10,000 metres of cloth for 60,000 pairs of trainers.
Margaret says Harris Tweed makes perfectly good shoe fabric.
“Harris Tweed is the original performance fabric. Long before the likes of Gore-Tex and other technical fabrics, people were using natural fibres with all their natural properties to protect themselves,” she says.
“Because our fabric is made from 100% British wool it has inherent showerproof properties. It’s breathable and doesn’t easily absorb water.
“The fabric isn’t waterproof,” she adds, “but it has an element of durability.
“We do have a lot of rain here – and the sheep cope quite well.”
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