The Adidas VIRGINIA Watermoc release lands on 5 September, bringing back a long-dormant water shoe silhouette with three colourways and the kind of practical construction that holds up well beyond a beach party. Priced at $140, it drops via CONFIRMED, adidas.com, and select retailers worldwide.
From Creek Bed to Collab: The Watermoc’s Origins
The shoe behind this drop is the Adidas Adventure Water Moc, a performance model built for paddling and scrambling through rocky creek beds. The report dates the original to 1997, though Complex describes the silhouette’s roots as early 2000s. Either way, Adidas offered variations on the Water Moc over the years without ever giving it a proper lifestyle treatment. This VIRGINIA version is the first time that has changed.
The Watermoc keeps the functional bones intact: a lugged rubber sole for grip on wet rock, an upper built from neoprene and breathable mesh, and bungee lacing for a fast, secure fit. What VIRGINIA added is a triangular strap across the tongue, there both to sharpen the fit and to give the shoe a visual edge it never had in its original performance guise.
Pharrell Williams first showed the Watermoc at a Marseille beach party in June, which is a reasonable venue for a shoe designed to handle water. The setting was fitting too given how the VIRGINIA collaboration has developed: the Jellyfish, a reworked Adistar Cushion 3, proved a genuine hit when it arrived, and the follow-up Flat Earther, a slimmer reworked yoga shoe, dropped in March. The Watermoc is the boldest move yet, going back to an obscure archive silhouette and asking whether it can carry a lifestyle audience.
Adidas VIRGINIA Watermoc Colourways in Full
Three colourways drop on the day. According to SiteSupply, the lineup breaks down as ‘Core Black with Silver Metallic’, a clean and straightforward option; ‘Yellow and Core Black with Metallic Silver’, the kind of high-vis combination that works as well on a river bank as it does in a car park; and ‘Lucid Ray Blue and Silver Metallic’, which layers multiple shades of light blue with cream, grey, pink, and reflective details.
That third colourway is the one that makes the shoe. The pale blue and reflective finish catches light in a way that reads differently in sunshine than it does under a street lamp, and the cream and pink accents stop it from feeling cold or technical. For anyone who spends time near water, sea swimming, scrambling along a low-tide coast, crossing a Scottish burn in the back end of summer, the neoprene upper and lugged sole are genuinely useful, and the colourway means you are not stuck with something that looks like it was pulled from a kayaking catalogue.
The bungee lacing is worth noting for outdoor use. Traditional laces and soaking wet feet are a poor combination, particularly when you are trying to pull footwear on and off at a tidal swimming spot or a river crossing. Bungee systems stay manageable when wet, and the triangular tongue strap should prevent the upper from shifting when the shoe takes on water.
The VIRGINIA collaboration has covered a lot of ground since the Jellyfish turned heads: a chunky rework, a slim yoga silhouette, and now a creek-and-coast water shoe. The Adidas VIRGINIA Watermoc release on 5 September at $140 is the sharpest test yet of whether that creative range can hold together as a coherent body of work rather than a sequence of one-off experiments.
