Oakley and Brain Dead Are Getting Into Sneakers Together

Brain Dead founder Kyle Ng and Oakley's Brian Takumi explain how their Oakley Factory Team collaboration featuring the reissued Flesh shoe came to fruition.

Brain Dead x Oakley Flesh
Publicist

Image via Oakley

Brain Dead x Oakley Flesh

Bringing back a shoe from years past is no easy feat. At the designer level, tasks like sourcing hard-to-find archive models, re-creating molds, and finding comparable materials can halt a retro project before it gets off the ground. By the time the shoe winds up in the hands of a nostalgic consumer, they’re ready to pick it apart with a magnifying glass to see how it matches up to the original. It can be a daunting process—there are several stories in the sneaker industry of retros being abandoned or significantly altered due to these limitations—but when brands are able to nail it, the juice is more than worth the squeeze.

For Oakley, which is known more for its eyewear than its footwear, there’s less of a precedent when it comes to bringing shoes back. Reissuing its Eye Jacket glasses (made famous by Michael Jordan) or the fan-favorite Frogskins is one thing. Re-creating a shoe that’s over two decades old is a different beast entirely. Would a brand that’s not a major player in the sneaker space be able to get it right? 

Enter Brain Dead, the Los Angeles-based clothing brand that founder Kyle Ng says functions as more of an idea company than a product pusher. A longtime fan of the eyewear company, Ng had a particular affinity for the obscure Oakley Flesh, a slip-on shoe released by the brand in 2000. Despite being off of shelves for 20-plus years, the Flesh has managed to find relevance with today’s moodboard-driven social media consumption, regularly appearing on curated Instagram accounts. 

Brain Dead and Oakley’s initial talks revolved around working on glasses, but plans changed after Francesco Milleri, CEO of Oakley parent company Luxottica, suggested that Ng’s team work on footwear. Then, when Ng and Brian Takumi, vice president of product creative catalyst at Oakley, began plotting a Brain Dead x Oakley collaboration, they saw the potential for something bigger. Rather than a one-off collab, the two entities have come together to launch the Oakley Factory Team, a reimagining of experimental Oakley projects from the past seen through a futuristic lens.

The first launch from the Brain Dead-assisted Oakley Factory Team is the Flesh, which releases today in two colorways with updated design details for $165 apiece from wearebraindead.com. A third non-collaboration colorway launches May 3 for $155. Ahead of the drop, we caught up with Ng and Takumi to find out exactly what the Oakley Factory Team is, what the process of reissuing the Flesh was like, and what we can expect down the road. The interview, lightly edited for clarity, appears below.

Can you tell me a little bit about what the Oakley Factory Team is? Is Brain Dead part of it?

Kyle Ng:
So basically a year and a half ago or two years ago, I met with Brian and the team over at the Oakley headquarters due to our fascination with Oakley. I think we were connected just off the idea of mutual respect for the companies. And I was probably collecting a lot of Fleshes at the time. Think someone like Dylan [Radloff] who’s part of the Oakley team saw that I was wearing those. And I think we mentioned the idea that we’re interested in footwear and Brian being the archivist of all Oakley and obviously the creative director, he ran me through the whole brand and lineage of what Oakley is about and what they have done in the past and where they’re going in the future.

This idea was spearheaded off the bat, where they came to us and the Luxottica CEO [Francesco Milleri] was like, “Hey, we wanted to get an Oakley shoe made again and would love for you to help create it.” From that perspective, Brian and I, we’re just thinking about it and I’m like, “It’s cool if it was a Brain Dead Oakley shoe, but what’s cooler is if we’re producing the shoe and teamed up and created a project that reminded us of the early R&D eras of a lot of businesses.” And funny enough, I was playing a lot of paintball at the time. They always called the teams, “the factory teams”, “cap factory team.” Or this idea of factory teams being the R&D research for companies and just using their tools and products.

I think I saw something within the Oakley Factory Team. And I just love this idea of like, “Oh, I’m someone who wears the products. I wear Oakley’s I wear it on my feet. I wear them on my eyes. I wear helmets, goggles, etc.” What if Brain Dead was the factory team to Oakley through that idea. What Brain Dead represents, we’re not just a product creator, we create ideas a lot, whether it’s content, movies, art, etc. What if we were this extension that probably they want to experience this great avant-garde quality in the nature of Oakley, but as a larger company with the big ship at the helm, it’s hard to move.

A lot of the business core, business was built off crazy ideas off the bat, from what Brian told me. And he could speak upon that himself. But the idea of this character, Max Fear Light, was a story that was created a long time ago of this iconic visionary, who Oakley was based off of. We wanted to be this extension of that idea of how conceptual Oakley has always been and bring into a new generation where this could be a window for Oakley to experiment not only in product, but concept.

Brian Takumi: To add to that, to give you more context, Oakley back in the day used to have factory pilots, which were exactly as Kyle said, the test pilots, the ones who were trying new things. I think as we got into this partnership, it wasn’t to force Kyle into being, “Hey, use factory pilots and bring it back.” As he was saying to give Brain Dead its own identity of what it would be to Oakley than just saying, “Kyle, just be a new factory pilot.” We thought it more meaningful that Brain Dead was able to own its own thing and be the Factory Team and create its own entity with that then necessarily just bring back the factory pilot program.

Oakley Flesh Catalog
Brain Dead x Oakley Flesh
Oakley Flesh 2022