Remember when the experience of buying sneakers mattered as much as the sneakers themselves? If you grew up in the ’90s like I did, chances are the answer is yes. It may be hard to believe, but back then, in the era of Jordan, Pippen, Shaq, and Penny, hype culture didn’t exist—or at least not in the modern sense.
We didn’t have drops. We didn’t have Supreme collabs, and we surely didn’t have the SNKRS app. We had the mall and Eastbay. We had Big 5 and Foot Locker. We had local brick-and-mortar shops, and when our parents took us sneaker shopping it was an event. Whether it was copping fresh sneakers for the first day of school or getting laced for the upcoming youth basketball season, the only hype around was the genuine excitement we felt for the silhouettes of that era.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the excitement I felt when purchasing a new pair of sneakers dissipated. (Sigh, adulthood.) The childhood memories faded. Until one day, well into my 30s, I found myself working for Complex on a docuseries focused on telling the stories behind the shoes that birthed what we know today as “sneaker culture.”
When we rolled cameras for the premiere episode of Sole Origins, DJ Clark Kent said: “There’s a reason I have 100 pairs of white-on-white Air Force 1s… I’m about being fresh. What are you about?”
It immediately took me out. That single statement—“I’m about being fresh”—tapped into a long-lost feeling, the feeling I got when I pulled up to the mall, allowance on full, with only one goal: buying new shoes. It was as if a time machine took me back to that Big 5 in Westlake Village, California. I remembered the giddiness I felt when I wore the shoes out of the store, and to school the next day. I remembered what it was like to feel fresh.
Sole Origins provides a global account of the world’s most important and impactful sneakers — shoes like the Diamond Dunk, Dave’s Quality Meat x Nike Air Max 90 “Bacon,” and the Jordan 4 Retro UNDFTD. But the show was born out of a singular ethos: the importance of wearing your sneakers. Its message is the antithesis of today’s hype culture. Kids buy shoes and never wear them, or they buy them just to resell on one of the many apps built to capitalize on hype. Not only have the stories behind the shoes been lost, but our own stories have also drifted away.
Sole Origins story producer Russ Bengtson, one of the world’s foremost sneaker experts, said it best: “Before if you saw someone wearing a certain shoe, you knew that they knew something, or that they had been somewhere. And now you don’t have that certainty anymore. Now it’s just a matter of who has the most money… It’s not the same. It’s just as important for the person who buys it to have a story than it is for the brand to tell a story, or for the store to tell a story.”
Time and again while shooting this series, our interview subjects would tell us stories of the first time they saw X sneaker, or the first time they wore Y pair of kicks. Whether they hailed from L.A. or Berlin or New York or Paris, everybody conveyed the same message: stories and experience matter.
When the Sole Origins roadshow hit Tokyo, we spoke to DJ Neil Armstrong, who broke it down quite frankly.
“What originally wasn’t really based on capitalism, what originally was about style, and personal choice, and history,” he said, “I think we might have lost some of that unfortunately.”
As the hype around sneakers boomed in the early to mid-2000s, the lack of organic storytelling behind highly sought-after drops paralleled the loss of memorable sneaker buying experiences. The internet leveled the playing field, and mobile apps, resellers, and raffles blew it to pieces. What was once an exciting and rare event became a highly stressful, anxiety-ridden endeavor. Individuality and self-expression were the first casualties for hypebeasts. Love of sneakers was supplanted by the thirst for hype, and the shoes we cared about growing up are now clout builders for a new generation.
While shooting Sole Origins in the U.K., we had an interesting dialogue with Mubi Ali, the former head of product for Sneakersnstuff in London, who touched on his experiences and how they helped define his connection to his favorite silhouettes.
“You could ask me any question and I could give you a story on how I got those shoes, and I think that’s where experience comes into play,” he said. “Those experiences when I was queuing for shoes, I remember the people that were in front and behind me. I remember the conversations that I was having with those people about the shoes.”
But experiences, as with anything in life, evolve. Constant innovation and technological advancement push us forward. Auto-lacing concept shoes from an iconic 1980s film are now real as ownable grails (at least for really rich collectors and rappers). There’s even a movement bubbling where virtual sneakers are the next wave, so you could potentially own and rock the most elusive pairs through augmented reality, even if you never touch their physical form. All of this makes it near impossible to fault today’s young sneakerhead for not knowing the story behind the “Flu Game” Jordan 12s or that the Jordan 1s they’re rocking were once banned from the NBA for breaking uniform regulations.
In the end, what makes coveted sneakers so amazing isn’t the massive hype that drives their resale value, it’s the rare and unique history behind each individual release. It’s how the genesis of each sneaker connects to our story. Just like our favorite songs, our favorite sneakers define whole seasons in our lives.
In the Sole Origins New York episode, original Supreme store manager Alex Corporan tapped into another childhood obsession to explain the sneaker scene.
“It’s like a superhero comic,” he said. “Why did the Hulk become the Hulk? Why did Spider-Man become Spider-Man?… It’s because there’s an origin story to it, and there’s like a history to everything.”
If not for Sole Origins, I’d likely have forgotten mine. So cheers to God’s favorite DJ for reminding me that it’s about being fresh.
What are you about?
