National Post (National Edition)
Sneakerheads
Michael Jordan’s impact on the NBA was huge. His impact on shoe culture might be even bigger.
On the morning of June 25th, five million people registered their names and email addresses on the website capsule.dior.com to vie for the privilege of spending more than US$2,000 on a pair of shoes.
The highly coveted, limited-edition Air Jordan I OG Dior sneakers are a collaboration between the Nike-owned Jordan brand and luxury fashion house Christian Dior Couture, and only 13,000 pairs were produced, according to Dior chief executive Pietro Beccari. About 5,000 were reserved for celebrities, influencers and Dior’s top clients. The other 8,000 were sold through Dior’s online raffle, which means that approximately 0.0016 per cent of the people who entered to purchase the shoes were actually able to. The other 4,992,000 received an email informing them their request was denied.
If US$2,000 seems like an enormous sum to spend on a pair of sneakers, you will hardly believe how much people are actually willing to pay for a pair of those Air Jordan Diors. Now on the online sneaker marketplace StockX, they are fetching more than 500 per cent over their original retail value, for an average resale price of $18,364. A pair in my size, 11-and- a-half, are listed for $29,142, plus shipping and taxes. These are not the theoretical figures of speculators tentatively wondering what the market will bear. The shoes were released two weeks ago, and nearly 70 pairs have already been purchased on StockX for these astronomical amounts.
The Air Jordan I OG Diors are among the most exclusive sneakers in the world. But while they command extraordinary prices — and will continue to in the weeks and months to come — they are not a unique or even unusual phenomenon. Shoes, and in particular athletic sneakers, have in recent years emerged as one of the most sought-after goods in the world of fashion, with limited-edition products and namebrand collaborations transforming new releases into special events. The worldwide sneaker market is valued at close to US$60 billion, and is expected to near US$100 billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research. Another research firm reports that North Americans spend more than US$2 billion a year buying sneakers second-hand on sites such as StockX. The sneaker resale market alone is expected to be worth US$6 billion by 2025.
Sneakers are no longer merely for sports. They’re no longer merely footwear. They are now the ultimate democratic force, worn by everyone, from the lowliest hustler to the wealthiest executive, beloved by kids scrounging their allowance and billionaires boasting the rarest kicks. You can wear sneakers on the court or in court, to the office or to the fashion show, with a tank top and shorts, or as the finishing touch with the most finely tailored suit.
The sheer variety of styles — and the range of prices for the most-common and most-coveted styles — have made sneakers into nothing less than an expression of personal identity, at once a status symbol for the super-rich and an emblem of cool for those who aspire
SNEAKERS ARE NO LONGER MERELY FOR SPORTS. THEY ARE NOW THE ULTIMATE DEMOCRATIC FORCE
to be. If you have money and taste, in 2020, you wear Jordans — and if you don’t have money, you wear Jordans as well. As the writer and actor Lena Waithe explained to The Ringer in an article about sneaker culture earlier this year, “the guy who’s bagging your groceries and Jay-Z are wearing the same shoe.”
To understand the ubiquity of sneakers, you have to understand one shoe: The Air Jordan I. In the early 1980s, Michael Jordan was an upstart basketball player from North Carolina who was attracting a great deal of attention in his early seasons with the Chicago Bulls, who had drafted him third in 1984 when he was just 23. The year before, he won the NCAA Championship and graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. With the Bulls, he was an overnight sensation, selling out stadiums that had languished half-empty the season previous and wowing crowds with his flamboyant, gravity-defying style. His star power was so evident so quickly that Nike courted the young player for an endorsement deal in 1985.
At that time, Nike was not the major player in the shoe business. Reebok was more popular among American sports fans, and the most beloved basketball players, including Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, were appearing in commercials advertising shoes for Converse. Nike’s deal with Jordan came at a precarious time for the brand, and at a considerable price: their fiveyear, US$2.5 million contract was the most expensive sneaker endorsement deal ever co-ordinated, made all the more remarkable considering Jordan was still a rookie, without the major name recognition of bona fide league MVPs such as Bird and Johnson. Jordan would win Rookie of the Year that season and confirm his rising stardom. But to make their new deal worthwhile, Nike needed more than that.
The Air Jordan, created by designer Peter Moore in collaboration with Jordan, was a marvel of construction and casual styling. The high, bold silhouette stood out against virtually every other basketball shoe on the market, and the colour scheme — a mix of red, white, and black, in tribute to the colours of the Chicago Bulls — made them versatile and sophisticated, capable of being paired with almost anything. In place of the usual Nike “Swoosh” logo, the Air Jordan bore a flying basketball insignia stamped on the side, which has since become iconic. As sneakers are concerned, they were revolutionary; 35 years later, they are as slick and stylish as ever.
“Nike had expected to sell only 100,000 pairs of the US$65 shoe in the first year,” the reporter Justin Sayles writes in his history of the Air Jordan brand. “Instead it shipped 1.5 million in the first six weeks.” An innovative ad campaign helped market the shoe outside the realm of basketball, selling it not only as sportswear ideal for street ball, but as something to wear roundthe-clock. Nike had the best year of its 22-year history in 1986, thanks largely to the success of the Air Jordan, and they endeavoured to prolong the good fortune the following year, by releasing the Italian-made Air Jordan II.
Widely considered the first luxury sneaker, the Jordan II had all the hallmarks of the original shoe, with subtle variations. Crucially, it established the annual routine: Nike could put out a new Air Jordan every year — and people would rush out to buy the latest drop. The Air Jordan XXXIV was released Sept. 25, 2019, the latest in an endless succession of sneakers everyone wants to own. Last year, 179 new styles of Air Jordan were released around the world, ranging from the Jordan 7 Retro Patta Icicle to the Jordan 13 Chinese New Year. In cities around the globe, ardent sneaker collectors — known as “sneakerheads” — have diligently collected every last one.
There are simple re-releases, known as “retro” drops, in which a classic Jordan shoe returns to the market with new patterns and colours, known as “colourways.” These retro releases range in rarity and value; some, such as the Air Jordan Retro 1 in the familiar red, white and black “Chicago” colourway, can be found easily and cheaply. Like a lot of people, I picked up a pair after watching the Michael Jordan docuseries The Last Dance on Netflix earlier this year. (The owners of StockX have said that web traffic on Jordans was up as high as 78 per cent on the Sunday nights when The Last Dance was on the air.) Jordans were already amazingly popular. This summer, the classic Air Jordan is having a bigger comeback than ever before.
Of course, serious sneakerheads could not care less about a shoe as widely available and inexpensive as the ones at Foot Locker. They are more concerned with securing a pair of something seriously special — those ultra-limited collaborations with designer fashion houses, hip-hop megastars and leftfield brands that appear, sell out instantaneously and then reappear on the resale market at staggering markups. The rapper Travis Scott designed a coffee-coloured Jordan 1 last year that fetches several thousand dollars on StockX. Virgil Abloh, head of the trendy fashion house Off-White, has led several Jordan collabs, including a riff on the Jordan 5 that came out in February.
And there’s the strangest and most coveted sneaker drop of 2020: Nike’s collaboration with Ben and Jerry’s, dubbed the Chunky Dunky. You can nab a pair for the reasonable price of US$2,000.
The most premium sneakers on the market — the Off-Whites, the Travis Scotts, the forthcoming shoes designed by Drake — are not so dissimilar from the Jordans that line the shelves at every sports store in every mall in the world. It isn’t some radical new design that distinguishes the Air Jordan I OG Diors from those ordinary Air Jordan 1s in my closet, and if you didn’t know anything about the relative value of sneakers and the importance of individual drops, you probably could not spot the difference between a pair of Jordans worth thousands of dollars and the commonplace varieties worth US$150. On the other hand, people without an eye for tailoring can’t tell apart a suit by Tom Ford and one on the rack at Banana Republic, and we take for granted that the best of the best is worth the price.
For sneakerheads, it’s as much about the process as it is about the look. You are probably not spending thousands of dollars on limited-edition shoes to throw them on and wear them out. (Like other kinds of collectors, sneakerheads will often keep their rarest finds at home wrapped in plastic, carefully preserved.) The hunt for rare sneakers is what makes them so intriguing and valuable, and part of what’s wonderful about the original Air Jordan is that it can be both elusive and unavoidable. For every Dior auctioned off for the price of a car, there are a thousand Chicago-coloured Air Jordans on the court, at the club and in the streets. It’s the sneaker of a generation, of a lifetime. And it’ll never get old.