Why Did Sunak’s Sambas Get So Much Coverage?

For the journalist and their commissioning editor, Rishi Sunak wearing Sambas is a gift. It has all the ingredients of a good, solid fashion news story: topical, relatable, humorous, and tragi-comic, depending on your view. Most people have a pair of Sambas, or at least a pair of Adidas trainers, making it the opposite of one of those nebulous fashion trends you really have to pitch hard to editors. 

Anyone wondering why Sunak’s Samba’s received so much coverage (and the level really has been extraordinary) need understand no more than this: that the editors in chief, be they of newspapers, radio stations or TV shows, understood the story. I’m emphasising this in case it’s useful to PRs to know that however good your relationship is with fashion / lifestyle editors or freelancers, and however strong and relevant your idea, once you’ve got it past them, they have to get it past their editor. EICs are much more hands-on than you might expect: most sign off on everything, ‘even’ fashion. 

For the desk head or freelancer, this can be frustrating. Many stories they consider to be solid get rejected because the EIC – usually a man, usually in his fifties or sixties – didn’t ‘get it’. But that is their prerogative. You’d also be amazed, perhaps, at how many of these award-winning, decisive titans of industry change their mind after seeing said story in a rival publication. Proof that, like our Prime Minister, we all need external validation, and we all copy each other on occasion.