Almost a year ago now I shared what I had found out about how to identify fake Ronnie Fieg, Clarks Adidas collaboration sneakers. I have had my eyes open for a pair secondhand since then as you can no longer buy this limited edition release in stores and where they are available dealers know they are desirable and can be sold at a premium. At the Kithmus release they retailed around $220 US dollars, now anywhere from £250 up for a new boxed pair, if you can find them.

They are expensive, anywhere between £150 and £350 even secondhand so it’s a big investment especially with so many fakes around.

I was really surprised and delighted to see a pair appear online in a charity shop listing. It was a bidding situation so I immediately followed. I was unable to check if the serial numbers were different in the right and left shoe, something I had discovered since my last purchase because images of this were not included. It should have been my first indicator to let this one go but it had been a while and I really wanted the shoes.

I was happy to bid up to £100, £120 at a push so I stayed up late to be in with a shot of winning the item, the auction ended around midnight. On the last day the shoes had been viewed over 100 times so I imagined there would be a lot of competition for them.

I had scrutinised the images provided, the toe looked the right shape, much narrower than the first pair, a good sign, the leather suede nappe looked right too. Really good quality. The green of the stripes was a bit off, more a blue green teal than dark Forest green but when I investigated this it wasn’t said to be an immediate red flag, colours varying with batch release. In fact when I inputted all the new images into Chat GPT, that came up with a thumbs up to say these shoes were authentic.

I didn’t look super closely at the soles which have to be signature Clark’s crepe, and looking at other pairs for sale these ones had not discoloured with wear which in hindsight is a big red flag. These soles turned out to be gum not crepe which is an indicator they are not authentic. They were also missing the triangle piece of leather threaded through the laces another indicator they may not be authentic.

But the biggest sign was when the end of the auction happened and I was the only bidder for this rare highly sought after item. I imagined there would be sneaker dealers far and wide bidding to scoop this item but no, only me.

When I won the item as the only bidder for a ridiculously low price I knew I had made a mistake. There I was like an idiot waiting to see the item start to move worrying I may not have bid high enough, about to lose out for a few pounds and absolutely nothing happened. I was first in a field of one.

I know the age old advice of something seems too good to be true it probably is. I immediately cancelled my purchase. I didn’t even want to wait until the sneakers arrived to check them out in person. I knew.

The most interesting part of the story for me was when I asked Ai again about authenticity using the same photos, the response I got days before saying no red flags immediately changed to red flags about the soles, the bleed on the stripes and most importantly the branding on the shoe tongue flaps. This wasn’t something I had really checked into from my last pair.

When I typed this was a completely different response from the last time using the same photos, ChatGPT asked me to login before I was able to continue. It had obviously had enough of me.

If you are in search of Ronnie Fieg, Clark’s, Adidas Samba trainers I’ve included a few pictures below of the tongue logos. You can see the authentic ones are much better quality leather and the brand embossing is much more pronounced and detailed.

Of course if you can get to the serial numbers and qr codes inside this is the easiest and quickest way to check authenticity.