Excerpts from Camille Dodero’s “Life, love and sneakers.”
Full article: http://www.thephoenix.com
“Even the tattiest pair of Air Jordans were worth $500 to an inmate, “like owning a Ferrari.” - Heppler
“Heppler learned that when you are locked away without a car or a girlfriend, sneakers aren’t just accessories, but your identity.” Everything was the same [in prison], except the sneakers, to define yourself.”
“In the free world, there is a larger urban global culture that regards sneakers with the same high esteem — a streetwear-savvy population that will pay hundreds for the right shoe. People who post digital pics of their daily footwear choices on message boards” and “kids who camp outside urban boutiques the nights before limited-edition releases drop, so they can slap down $100-plus for a rarity they’ll probably either put in storage or resell for three times more on eBay.”
“They’re sneakerheads. The whole process of buying, reselling, trading, collecting, discussing, analyzing, blogging, ogling, worshipping, scoping, hoarding, storing, and rocking them is what’s called the sneaker game. And with easily accessible online fashion-hype builders like HypeBeast.com (tagline: IT’S AN ADDICTION) and Niketalk.com, it’s being played now more than ever.”
“Sneaker culture isn’t just confined to online forums and brick-and-mortar high-end stores; it’s also creeping into the mainstream. Last February, when 150 potential buyers showed up at a Lower East Side boutique to purchase only 30 pairs of a $300 NYC-tribute shoe, the Nike Pigeon Dunk SBs (skateboards), a minor riot broke out. Thugged-out dudes waited on nearby corners to rob buyers leaving with their spoils, the NYPD swooped in, and the New York Post splashed the street ruckus on the front page.”
“There’s even a specialty market for art with sneakers as a muse: paintings, customized jewelry, Swiss chocolate.”
“New York City, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo were early-adopters of sneaker culture. Now Boston’s really starting to get into the game. Femalesneakerfiends.com, a Web community for laced-up ladies, launched from Jamaica Plain last April. Rob Heppler, now a free man living in Pepperell, hosts a biweekly sneaker Podcast called Weekly Drop with Arlington resident Jeff Cavalho. When New Balance released its first “Artist Series,” the Allston company selected only one contributor, Somerville painter/illustrator Josh Wisdumb. The national traveling collectible-shoe exhibition “Sneaker Pimps” has stopped by Lansdowne Street two years in a row. Over the holidays PUMA offered its design-your-own-shoe process, the Mongolian BBQ, in Boston. New Balance, PUMA, Converse (now owned by Nike), and Reebok (now owned by Adidas) are headquartered in Massachusetts. And then there are the new independent outlets selling specialty sneakers: streetwear boutique Karmaloop settled into Newbury Street this past fall; last month saw the soft opening of Laced, a brand-new NYC-style sneaker/skateboarding boutique in the South End.”
“To the brands,
the hardcore collectors are commercial visionaries.
“Before, a lot of this stuff just stayed in this culture,” says
Steve Gardner, vice-president of Lifestyle at Reebok.
“[Now] a lot of these kids are influencing fashion
— they’ve become the trend leaders.”
“DeJongh “Dee” Wells says he’s always fostered “a passion for sole,” but also sees sneakers as an investment. The 32-year-old advertising arm of the bimonthly glossy Sole Collector, Wells stopped tallying his collection after 550 pairs. (The industry often looks to sneakerheads for employees, consultants, and testers — Wells says he got his job because he made a name for himself on a sneaker message board.) His best treasures are old-school: a vintage pair of Puma Clyde baskets, 1978 waffle-treaded Nike Cortez, and an original 1989 set of Air Jordan IVs. He guesstimates the latter to be worth $800. “I can’t wear the sneaker because it’s so old it’d just disintegrate.”
“Married with a five-year-old daughter, Wells thinks he’ll be able to fund his little girl’s education by reselling his deadstock. So he keeps his shoes secure, divided among a U-Haul storage facility, his Worcester home, and relatives in Brooklyn, St. John, St. Thomas, and Puerto Rico.”
“Sneakers are the only thing available to a man that can make him an individual,” says Jeff Cavalho of Weekly Drop.” The subculture is so small that if I owned a pair of Diamonds, the chance of finding someone else wearing that shoe would be almost nil. But when somebody stops you, which happens occasionally, and they’re like, ‘Where’d you get those?’ There’s a connection.” The right sneaker can be a cipher. “You’re not part of mass culture; you understand something larger about your environment.”
“Even though he’s tried to keep the specialty shop’s arrival on the down-low until he gets more supply, the doors were open for two days when Niketalk.com users started posting about it. Such is the nature of sneaker-nerd hype. “These kids get online, they talk all day long in all these chat rooms about what color’s better, and who has this, and what store has that,” says Spungie. To people like Spungie who’ve been immersed in the culture for over a decade — he’s a skateboarder who managed Concepts for 10 years before this — sneakers used to suggest something real about their owner, an attitude, style, or background. Back then, sneaker lovers mostly came out of hip-hop, skateboarding, graffiti, or basketball. Now they come from Google. “It’s just amazing how many kids have an opinion on the whole thing now. You don’t even know the kid; been in the game for like six months. And he’s got the right to open his mouth? Get out of here.”
Concepts’s Point describes his older regulars as “hood dudes” who are “unemployed and get their money whatever way.” Now, “everybody’s hearing about this kind of thing now, so it’s a big thing for everybody to get involved with. Whereas before, it was something that only a select few people do.”
Sneakerheads are widely considered educated consumers, able to name-drop the history, background, and designer of a particular shoe. But burgeoning popularity tends to breed ignorance. “People that have no idea what they’re talking about and they’ll come in and ask for a rare, exclusive sneaker and I’m like, ‘What the fuck? Did you just come out of a time capsule? Those came out four years ago,’” says Point. “Or like when [The] Game rapped about having a pair of Air Max 95s [in “To Love It Or Hate It”], I had three kids come in and ask me for a pair and they were standing right in front of five different Air Maxes. I’m like, ‘You’re standing right in front of them — pick a color, stupid.’”
On the first Weekly Drop, Cavalho and Heppler tried to elucidate why they’re so into sneakers. “Everybody’s gone to the party,” says Heppler. “And someone has had their same jacket or their same T-shirt. But when you’re in this game, you know that nobody is [going to have your sneakers]. And if you find someone that actually happens to have one of the same T-shirts, sweatbands, sneakers? You almost embrace them in a loving hug to say, ‘My God, you’re almost half as cool as me.’” He pauses. “Before you slap them like a pimp and take their sneakers.”
“What makes people unique is really what’s on your feet,” agrees Cavalho. “The bigger question, though, is how many people outside of sneakerheads really care?”
“There’s not a conversation going on in the community about how sneakers are being made,” says Lobenstine.
For the most part, there’s also no shame in finding corporate products cool. “There’s just too many chumps in America with too much loose change, all willing to pay anything to step into the shoes of champions,” writes Adam Neiman, CEO of the sweatshop-free Waltham-based sneaker company No Sweat Apparel, in an e-mail. “That’s what Nike has always sold and always will. But to turn the essence of chumpdom into the essence of cool?”
Perhaps it’s the object. “There is something very non-corporate about wearing this kind of shoe,” explains Jeff Cavalho. “Nike is corporate, this form is not.”
When it gets too trendy,
the real ’heads will move on. “The people that were here first,
they’re gonna get sick of it,” says Spungie (Laced Boston). “Those
are the real trendsetters in life. And those are the people who’ll
find out what the next thing is.”
Excerpts from Jamaal Johnson’s “Sneakerheads are serious about their shoes.”
Full article: http://findarticles.com/p
"The street and sneaker culture seems like it's going to be here to stay. People want to own something different and be part of an exclusive group; whether shoes, political parties or special organizations."
"People eat and
breathe sneakers, it's like their mission in life for the extreme sneakerheads."
Kevin Roberts, CEO
of Saatchi and Saatchi discusses “Lovemarks” and sneaker culture.
Full article:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages
“A Lovemark is a brand that has created loyalty beyond reason; it's infused with mystery, sensuality and intimacy, and that you recognize immediately as having some kind of iconic place in your heart. And I'll give you two personal stories of mine. Maybe eight weeks ago now, I was in Seattle talking to 3,000 college professors -- not a very stimulating kind of way to spend the day. And I went to the Adidas concept store in Seattle. I didn't need anything, nothing. $880 later and four bags later, I staggered out of the Adidas store, and I felt great, because I love Adidas and I always have. There's no reason for it. It's beyond reason. I didn't need anything in these bags. I bought stuff for my wife, for my kids, for me. I had no guilt, and I had no sense of "You stupid whatever, you just dropped 880 bucks." I didn't care; I felt great. I have loyalty beyond reason to Adidas, largely because of their heritage, their authenticity. If I try to rationalize how I've developed this -- as I was growing up playing rugby, Adidas were the best rugby boots -- but there's no reason really. I don't know why. They commune with me."
Wikipedia Article
about Nike Dunks, a popular model of sneaker:
full article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
“Nike's basketball shoe line was fairly popular in the skateboarding scene, and the Dunk soon became a popular shoe for riders due to the stability and lower profile sole which improved grounding performance. After some time, Nike created a Dunk specifically for skateboarders, known as the Nike SB Dunk. It features an extra-padded "puffy tongue" (common among skateboarding sneakers) and Nike's patented Zoom Air insole. Since then, the SB Dunk has become a popular subcultural icon for sneakerheads, or enthusiastic sneaker-collectors. Nike currently collaborates with many designers to create special edition and collectible Dunks, from Diamond Hardware's Nick Tershay to the popular graffiti artist known as Futura.”
“Currently, the Dunk SB line is in its sixth series, sporting a new black and purple box. Among the first five series of SB Dunks are the "Send Helps," designed by Todd Bratrud, "Eires", by Liam Sean Martin, and "Volcanoes" (also known as Pele's), which are designed after state of Hawaii.”
“The Nike Dunk's attractive design and technological implementation have caused the shoe to quickly make its way into the sneakerhead subculture. That SB Dunks are produced in limited quantities had further increased their appeal. The shoe has rapidly became popular internationally, specifically in Japan, the United States, Europe, and Korea. However, fakes, often Chinese-made, are plaguing online auction sites as well as illegal retail websites and often trick naive sneaker enthusiasts into buying them for lower, and sometimes even high, prices. The knock-offs also confuse dedicated sneaker enthusiasts about which shoes are real and which fake because most often no differences are apparent.”
“The SB Dunk is sold to stores for
fairly low prices, with recommended retail prices anywhere between $65.00-$99.00.
However, since they are popular among collectors and skateboarders alike,
stores tend to raise the prices on the shoes based on the demand for
them. This often happens when a shoe is "hyped" up, or overly
talked about and anticipated, then bought at much higher prices by the
masses than suggested retail. Hype is considered "dangerous"
by many sneaker enthusiasts, due to the fact that Nike has lowered the
quality of materials and manufacturing for the Nike SB Dunk since the
first generation of shoes were released, whereas the prices of the shoes
sold by stores hike higher and higher -- some of the more rare, "limited,"
or hyped shoes sell for over a thousand dollars a pair. During many
initial releases of limited Dunks, long lines have formed at retailers.
At one specific store in New York during the release of the infamous
"Pigeon" dunk, a riot formed. The New York City Police Department contacted taxi cab services to transport away
those lucky few who actually received the sneakers, and after the rowdy
crowds dispersed, knives and baseball bats were found laying in the
streets.”
Maria Hampton’s “How Nike Conquered Skateboard Culture”
Full article: http://adbusters.org/the
This is an intriguing article as it presents both positive and negative opinions on Nike’s role in skateboarding culture. Please read the comments after the article.
The article is a good commentary on the fact that Nike is smart to create an aura around their products based on limited availability and high prices, which has let those who consumed basketball-related shoes to move to consuming the skate shoe market. They also recognize that to some skaters they are attractive, because while they are a huge corporation, they are the “counterculture” in traditional skate culture. This clashes from Nike’s role in basketball culture, where their association with victory and domination (especially through marketing Michael Jordan) has propelled them to success and cultural significance.
Perhaps with the rising popularity
of skate culture, the idea of “selling out” has become obselete,
especially in an environment where as Hampton states, “sneakerheads
are not “buying product” to complement their lifestyle, buying
product is their lifestyle.” She goes on to state that “the
new generation has consumed the shoes but ditched the skating.”