Wales Bonner’s adidas Originals work has reached that point where the standard feels almost unfair on everyone else.

The designer’s latest adidas Originals collection – which features the long-awaited leopard print Predator boot teased last year – is yet another clear sign that Wales Bonner  understands something a lot of fashion still doesn’t: football and the culture around it does not need dressing up to become interesting.

The proof is there, from her multitude of seasonal collaborations with adidas – including a plethora of reworked track suits and iterations of classic sneakers like the Samba – to her 2023 work with the Jamaican National Football Team.

Football already carries elegance, memory, aspiration, masculinity, migration, uniform, and the smart move, which is where the British designer is excelling, is not to overload it, but to read it properly. And since her debut adidas Originals collab in 2020, that’s what she has done better than anyone.

Where most fashion flirtations with football end up either too literal or too precious, Wales Bonner tends to land in the sweet spot. She keeps the emotional charge of the sport intact, but filters it through a sharper lens. The references are there, obviously, but they never feel like references for their own sake.

Even six years in, everything still feels authored and deliberate. The reason people keep coming back to her work is not just that the shoes are good (though they are), it is that Wales Bonner has managed to shift the way football-coded adidas Originals product can look and feel.

She has taken silhouettes (most famously the Samba) with deep sporting lineage and made them feel softer, stranger, richer, without stripping out what made them matter in the first place.

Plenty of collaborators can add luxury, but very few can add perspective like she does. Crucially, too, Wales Bonner has never been trapped by her own hits. That is often where these partnerships go flat – one successful formula, repeated until it becomes brand wallpaper.

Wales Bonner has avoided that by keeping the language moving: one season the emphasis falls on texture and proportion, another on shape, another on a more direct football cue. The common thread is judgement. She knows when to lean into the romance of sport and when to leave space around it. That’s why the Predator feels so right, and why it matters now. 

Coming just after her Fall/Winter 2026 collection and alongside an adidas Originals Spring/Summer 2026 offering that includes a football jersey and shorts, it does not read like a one-off stunt.

Others use the sport because it is culturally hot, but Wales Bonner uses it because she knows what it holds. And that’s why whenever she touches adidas Originals, it still feels better than anyone else’s version of the same idea.