Atlantica - 01.12.2006, Blaðsíða 18

16 AT L A N T I CA
Yeah, I like sneakers. Piled up outside my door are 37
pairs of shoes, of which more than half are sneakers,
including Vans, Nikes, Tigers, Etnies, Pumas, and
Converse.
The soles on my oldest and most favorite pair
– white lo-top Converse All-Stars I bought in 1995
– are smooth like a freshly waxed gym floor from 11
years of sole stepping and pavement pounding.
All-Stars, introduced in 1917, are the all-time best-
selling sneakers. Sales have topped nearly 600 million
pairs. But unlike some collectors, I’ve never waited
in line for a pair. Nor have I paid more than USD 150
for my shoes. I wear sneakers because I believe in
their practicality, but some folks – the true believers
– buy one pair to wear and one pair to stash away for
safekeeping.
Enter Sneakerplay (sneakerplay.com), one of the
latest additions to the sneaker-obsessed world. The
site, which launched this June, is kind of like a mini
MySpace for its 2,000 member sneaker enthusiasts.
Online, people can connect with like-minded shoe
aficionados, post photos of their shoes (almost 10,000
images have been uploaded), and take part in a
friendly battle system that pits two sneakers against
one another, with the community commenting and
voting on the kicks to decide a winner.
“This is a great way for people to get to know one
another through friendly competition,” says Rob Jama,
one of Sneakerplay’s three founders who owns about
25 pairs himself. (“That’s probably on the lower end
compared to a lot of the members on Sneakerplay...
one person has almost 1,700 pairs,” he tells me.)
Jama says the concept for Sneakerplay, which is
by invitation only, started as a joke. “I was talking on
the phone with one of my close friends late last year.
The word ‘sneakerbeefs’ came up,” he told me from
his home in Toronto. A ‘sneakerbeef,’ he explained, is
the phrase Jama and his buddy coined to describe a
match that determines who has the coolest shoes.
“I said to my friend, ‘Wouldn’t it be crazy if we
made a website where people could literally have
sneakerbeefs and battle shoes?’ We teamed up with
another buddy and hammered out the service in four
months.”
As it turns out, sneaker collecting as we know it
has been around for at least two decades and can
be attributed to a couple subcultures: basketball, the
early days of hip hop, and alternative action sports like
skateboarding.
Basketball has been one of the most significant
influences, says Bradley Carbone, a sneaker expert.
“Ever since the late 80s with every release of the
Jordan, the shoe became a new kind of collectible
thing,” says Carbone, who is also an editor at the
American urban lifestyle magazine Complex. And
from basketball, the fever grew. “Even now, every
time there’s a drop [of a new Jordan], there’s a line
out the door.”
Did you read that? A drop? There’s even a whole
lexicon reserved for these sneakerheads, inside lingo
referring to an aficionado of exclusive, special edition,
often hard-to-find sneakers. A ‘drop’ means the specific
release date of a shoe.
Ultimately, a sneaker’s cult worth all comes down
to a formula of a shoe’s edition, run and release date.
Limited edition refers to special runs of a particular
shoe, says Carbone, who won’t confess to the number
of shoes he owns other than admitting that “It’s getting
to be a lot.” A ‘run’ refers to the number that are made,
which is usually between a few dozen and 1,000 pairs.
“When thinking about a global distribution, it can
spread pretty thin,” he says.
And these aren’t your average leather sneakers.
Well, sometimes they are. Sometimes it’s the same
ole sneaker but in a special color scheme. Or made
out of some strange salmon scale-like texture. Or it’s a
sneaker that’s made in collaboration with an artist; say
Eric Haze, a legendary graffiti artist in New York, who
has collaborated with Nike for a limited edition run of
the Dunk Hi and Dunk Low.
On a shoe’s release date, legions of collectors
line up for hours in advance to score a pair of shoes,
like Garner Hicks, 15, a high-school sophomore in
California.
This summer, Hicks paid USD 40 for the cab alone
to whisk him from his room at 7 am on a Friday
morning to BLENDS, a local sneaker boutique in Costa
Mesa, in anticipation of scoring a new pair of limited
edition Nikes, a new Air Max 1 reissue retailing for
USD 180.
The doors didn’t open until 10 am.
“I arrived at 9 am only to find a mob of sneakerheads
camped outside the boutique,” Hicks says. “At 10:02
am and as the doors slowly opened, everyone began
to get anxious. People crawled out of their North Face
sleeping bags and laced up their sneakers. One by one
each of them entered the store, and one by one they
each came out with a black and brown shoebox.”
Hicks wasn’t one of those lucky enough to walk
out with a shoebox. He was too far back in the line to
get one of the shoe pairs the store had acquired.
To add to their product’s exclusivity, a manufacturer
like Nike or Puma may only release new limited
editions at select shoe stores. In other words, niche
shoes are sold in niche shoe stores.
Sneaker collecting used to be an underground,
urban market, centered primarily in New York, Los
Angeles, London, Tokyo, and Miami. To some degree,
it still is. There are still some shoes you can only get in,
say, New York.
But the Internet has helped the number of
sneakerheads multiply almost fanatically. With online
stores, websites like Sneakerplay and hypebeast.com,
and message boards like niketalk.com devoted to
the craze, the culture has broadened and become
much more accessible, says Carbone. “You can live in
the middle of nowhere and still have access to these
limited edition shoes.”
And why sneakers?
“They’re an accessible luxury. Even if some cost a
couple hundred dollars, by owning them you
become a part of an elite group,” he says. “It’s about
identification with a group but also an attempt to be
an individual. By having something no one else has,
you stand out.”
Even 34 years after Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight
founded Nike, Inc., Nike still dominates the market.
The original Air Jordan I – the sneaker that started
it all – was released in 1985. The Air Jordan XXI was
released on 18 February 2006, during the NBA All-Star
Weekend. Jordans, unlike so many of their flash-in-
the-pan rivals, evidently will always be cool.
So what has sneaker cred these days? Right now,
the Nike Woven Air Footscape is “a very tough thing
to find,” with “very quick drops,” says Carbone. The
Jordan V Retros are also in right now – and with price
tags on some websites of up to USD 599. If you’re
determined, you can try to find a pair of the pre-
scuffed navy blue leather New Balance Stingray IIIs,
a highly exclusive shoe (just 60 in the world) made
exclusively for Microzine, an online magazine and
affiliated store based in Liverpool and London. Even
the Stingray’s shoebox is an exclusive – designed by
Liverpool studio JUNO, who designed the cover of the
Arctic Monkeys’ debut album.
When is enough finally enough?
Says Carbone, “A lot of the older people who’ve
been in the scene a long time, they have 100 pairs of
sneakers and they’re like, ‘this is ridiculous.’”
(Practical info on p. 18)
Sneakerheads, unite.
BY SARA BLASK.
Sole Searching
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