20 Ways The Sneaker Game Was Different 20 Years Ago

The Air Jordan line was well established as the pinnacle of luxury basketball footwear by 1992, but the main focus was still on the player, not the shoes. MJ was in his championship-winning, world-dominating, trash-talking prime, and it wasn't too difficult for Nike to push a shoe that was appearing in highlight reels every night and on NBC every week.

If you wanted a pair of sneakers in 1992, you went to a sporting goods store. And why not? Sneakers were sporting goods, just like baseball gloves or tennis racquets. Running shoes were primarily for runners, tennis shoes were primarily for tennis players. People were wearing them to make fashion statements, sure, but they were still being sold as utilitarian products. Hence the lack of retro products — wasn't the newest one the best? Why would you want an old sneaker? And the idea of a "sneaker boutique" was ludicrous. Were there baseball bat boutiques? Exactly.

If you were a typical kid in the early '90s, you had two pairs of sneakers: this year's pair and last year's pair. Last year's pair, no matter what they were, became your outdoor-basketball-playing, bike-riding shoes, and this year's pair was saved for school and the mall. If you had a third pair, it was from three years back, and those were for mowing the lawn, running around the woods and playing tackle football. And if that timeline was six months instead of a year, you were ballin'. Your "beaters" surely weren't a pair of exclusives that you'd worn in the rain once.

It's not like people weren't buying skate shoes. The Vans Half Cab — still widely recognized as the best skate shoe ever — was introduced in 1992, and Airwalk was moving units, even amongst the non-skate crowd. And it's not like the pro skate crowd was against mainstream brands. The Bones Brigade famously burned through a huge stock of original Air Jordans while filming Animal Chin, and Chuck Taylors were always a popular choice for their combination of low price and excellent board feel. But the days of companies like adidas and Nike trying to break into the skate market were still a long ways off.

What with the whole price-tag-as-status, lots of niche brands were able to wet their beaks. British Knights got their shoes on Derrick Coleman, Avia made simultaneous inroads into aerobics and basketball, even L.A. Gear had its adherents. Obviously Airwalk was big in the skate world (what's up, Tony Hawk?), and Patrick Ewing proved that not only could big men sell shoes, but they could start brands. And companies like ASICS weren't just selling to dare-to-be-different kids and serious runners. Even Euro-centric companies like Diadora and Ellesse made their presence known. The same companies that are dominant today were dominant then, there was just more room for the smaller brands to operate.

Imagine if Nike had done shoes for Michael Jordan back then the way they do shoes for LeBron now. There would have been 27 colorways of the Air Jordan VII, in everything from UNC to Laney High to Chicago Zephyrs colors. And this list may have been a lot different. These days LeBron gets as many colorways in a week as Mike did in an entire season. It's just not how it was done then. (Although newer brands like Ewing Athletics were catching on.)

You would think that, seven years after the introduction of the Air Jordan — an action that damn near saved the company — Nike would have released a whole gang of signature shoes. Well, you'd be wrong. Along with the Air Jordan, the top-of-the-line Nike sneakers were simply Force and Flight models, endorsed by a whole slew of All-Stars. It took Reebok's signing Shaquille O'Neal for Nike to eventually roll out signature product for Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen and one of Shaq's teammates who went by Penny.

When you walked into a sneaker store and saw a pair you wanted, there was no reason to stress. You could safely wait until your lawnmowing/snow shovelling/McDonalds money stacked up, and then go get whatever it is you were looking at. They weren't going anywhere. Stock shifted slowly, seasons were actually seasonal, and no one had to be constantly making room for the next new hotness. Hey, the Air Flight Huarache was the it basketball shoe of the early '90s and it only released in TWO colors. They were available for a while. Besides, how do you think all the diggers had ill old sneakers to find years later?

In the early '90s, there was still no fast way to learn about sneakers. You had to live it, and be friends with other people who lived it. You didn't have followers, you had friends. And if they were as into sneakers as you were, you went hunting together and told each other about spots. You watched NBA games and tried to figure out what people were wearing. There were more people into sneakers than there were in the mid-'80s, but it wasn't near what it is now. Not even close.

You know how you got a pair of player edition shoes in the '90s? No, you didn't camp out at 21 Mercer. Actually, you probably didn't want to be anywhere near 21 Mercer Street in 1992. You found out where NBA players left the arena, you hung out there, and you yelled and screamed and begged. Whatever it took. Of course chances are you weren't going to fit into those size 15s, but at least you had something truly special.

Sure, there were fewer releases available of each silhouette — but companies were making individual models by the hundreds of thousands, not the hundreds. Those Dream Team makeups that hit stores in summer were still sitting on the shelves of some stores by the time autumn rolled around. And hardly anyone was doing the "one to rock, one to stock" thing. In fact, in most cases you wore your new sneakers right out of the store. And you were probably copping bi-annually instead of bi-weekly.

And it wasn't HD, either. Nothing like sitting there, your face six inches from the screen, desperately trying to figure out what exactly it was that Patrick Ewing was wearing in the playoffs. The main alternative to TV was Sports Illustrated — if you were lucky. The Eastbay catalog wasn't as widespread as it is now, and widespread use of the Internet was still years off.

When the Beastie Boys and other downtown New York style mavens wanted old styles like adidas Campuses and Puma Clydes, they went to old sporting goods stores or secondhand clothing stores and went digging. There were actually a few old shoes still being made in the early '90s — like Air Force 1s and Converse All Stars — but they had either never gone out of production or catered to a very small market. When Nike re-introduced the first three Air Jordans a few years later, they just sat there. And sat there. Most pairs were blown out for $20.

In 1992 you were way more likely to find a graffiti artist in court than in the headquarters of a sneaker company. Sure, guys like Keith Haring and Basquiat had gained recognition outside their NYC circles — and had used sneakers as a medium — but the link wasn't quite there yet. If you wanted your sneakers to be an artistic statement, well, you needed to stop somewhere and get yourself a Sharpie.

If you were lined up outside a Foot Locker or Athlete's Foot in 1992, you were waiting for a job interview. Not only was there no need to buy sneakers on the very first day they became available, there was also no global audience to show off to. As long as you had those new kicks by the first day of school, you were all good.

Since sneakers didn't sell out and there were no "Hyperstrikes" (heck, everything was a hyperstrike), the only way to differentiate between sneakers was the price tag. So people naturally gravitated towards the flash, the high-end basketball and tennis sneakers in neon colors with all the amenities. Only those who really knew (and had access to running specialty stores) rocked the $200 grey New Balance.

Sneakers weren't like records in the early '90s — the idea of a "release date" was foolish. Other than the new Jordans dropping right around All-Star weekend, sneakers just came out when they came out. And since there wasn't any real worry about them selling out, no one really worried about exactly when they came out, either.

Of course if you weren't actually in Europe, you probably didn't even know whether there WERE European releases. It's not like you could see shots of them on Instagram or in the latest copy of Sneaker Freaker. Any international cross-pollination would have had to come from exchange students or tourists, and who wanted to copy them? America, f*ck yeah.

OK, maybe Biz Markie did. But most people treated sneakers as the disposable pieces of athletic wear they were, and only bought a new pair when the old ones wore out. Even the majority of NBA players who got their shoes for free would play in them for weeks, if not months, at a time. Sneaker collecting was for the obsessives and the wealthy, not every teenager with an internet connection.

Now that most people buy sneakers over the internet, a lot of what used to make the sneaker-buying experience special is gone. Opening that box for the first time is still exciting, but there's a difference between doing it in the comfort of your own home and doing it in a chair at the local sporting goods store. Plus, nowadays it's probably a weekly experience, whereas then it was damn near a holiday. Looking at the shoe on the shelf, turning it over and over in your hands, getting that box, lacing that one shoe up, trying it on, deciding to buy — it was a whole process, not just a simple click.