There’s a line outside the mall that never ends. It has a terminus in the form of a Foot Locker sign, a beacon of hope in the dim hours of the Texas morning, but the teeming mass of people trying to get there never seems to thin. The crowd at Greenspoint Mall in Houston swells by the minute, going wide with eager shoppers who are just barely contained by security barricades.
The year is 2011 and the congregation is here for the December re-release of the Air Jordan 11 in the “Concord” colorway, a sacred shoe coming back out for the first time in over a decade.
By the time the local Fox News affiliate shows up to cover the scene, many people have already quit the line. The sun still isn’t up. But the Get Money Boys already have the sneakers.
In a live segment, two men jog over to Fox’s reporter on the ground, giddy to show off their spoils. They refer to themselves as the Get Money Boys.
“We get a lot of money,” says one, “so it’s nothing for us to get shoes.”
They bring the middle-aged white guy reporter up to speed on sneaker culture in about 90 seconds, sharing frustrations about the low allocation of retros and suggesting future releases be held at Michael Jordan’s house. They even use the opportunity to offer some help to anyone who missed on the Jordans—a timely pitch as Christmas is two days away.
“The Get Money Boys, we do have some shoes we are selling,” one of them says directly into the camera. “So parents, look us up.”
The interaction sparked a classic viral clip, the kind that sneaker hobbyists could look forward to whenever there was a big Air Jordan 11 launch coming around Christmas in the 2010s. Now, it serves as a marker of contrast showing how the scene has changed in the last decade. It also serves as the inspiration for the latest campaign from Chicago designer Joe Freshgoods, whose ability to enrich footwear with compelling narratives has made him one of the best storytellers in sneakers.
In the Joe Freshgoods version, a fictional anchor covering a lineup for a pair of New Balances in Chicago consults with a local “shoe connoisseur” and Get Money Boy named D’Eonte Jackson. The pastiche borrows bars from the famous “Concord” Air Jordan 11 clip and uses the reference to promote Joe Freshgoods’ collaboration on the New Balance 1000, which releases on April 8.
As a Chicago native, Joe Freshgoods understands the cultural weight of the Air Jordan line. He made his name in sneakers through his work with New Balance, but he’s found clever ways to tie non-Jordan projects back to the city’s most indelible sneaker icon. Before he interpolated the Get Money Boys, he last year released a limited edition New Balance 650 that implicitly referenced Michael Jordan’s brief, forgotten history in New Balance.
Work like this shows a deep understanding of the history of sneakers; it suggests that in order to truly appreciate and understand them, one might pay attention to the footwear moments and memes of the generations before them.
That’s not to say that the Joe Freshgoods x New Balance 1000 is overly nostalgic. The spot is in some ways a tribute to a bygone era—Air Jordan 11 lineups don’t really happen like that anymore; instead, you smash a button on the SNKRS app and then go bemoan or celebrate the results on the social media app of your choice—but it’s not preachy. Joe Freshgoods knows we’re not going back to that.
Still, it does feel like a glimpse back into a time when things felt slightly purer. Make no mistake: the selling of sneakers, and the way brands capitalize on those willing to dedicate their lives to pursuing those shoes, has always been a for-profit enterprise. And the current state of sneaker collecting is more democratic, with the internet allowing more people than ever to participate.
But if you were into shoes back when the “Concord” Air Jordan 11 retro came out in 2011, it’s hard to watch the video and not feel like things were a little more exciting back then.
There was more in-person interaction and slightly less bickering on the internet. There were rituals that could be forgotten if the current trajectory continues: rising before the sun and shuffling to mall, making alliances in line, forming quick friendships with the people huddled around you in order to push back against anyone trying to cut in who didn’t already have their spot staked out.
And there was, between the trials and the long quests, legitimate enjoyment in the hunt for sneakers. The Get Money Boys, there at the mall in Houston in the December morning, saw it that way.
“It’s nothing to us to buy shoes,” says one of them in the video. “Man, we just came up here to have fun.”
