Let's leave sneaker hype in the past

We don't need to worship brands like this

There’s a certain kind of guy, of a certain kind of age, who has a thing for sneakers. For these people, sneakers aren’t shoes, they’re a lifestyle — a r’aison d’etre for many men who grew up into rap and/or basketball. Coming of age in the 00s, they read footwear blogs like Sneakernews and Sneakerfreaker, as well as broader lifestyle sites like Hypebeast, Complex and Highsnobiety (where I worked for just under five years). Of course, I’m being a little simplistic when I talk about men here, there’s plenty of female sneakerheads in the world too, but take a look at the whole scene and it’s overwhelmingly male.

In sneaker land, the meaning behind shoes is much more important than their functionality or their aesthetics. The space is filled with symbolism, hype and nostalgia, whether it’s the significance of Nike’s Jordan line, the history of Run DMC’s Adidas shell-toes or the ups and downs of Kanye’s many ventures into footwear design (he did shoes with BAPE, Louis Vuitton and Nike before his Yeezy line went up in flames).

You can divide the sneakerhead world into two camps. The first are the guys who got into kicks when they were young, and then branched out into fashion more broadly, following the menswear scene as it evolved in all sorts of interesting ways (you can find the fingerprints of Kanye West in so many places here — seriously, nobody has the ability to create trends like Kanye did at the height of his fame). The second group is the die-hard heads, who stayed true to their passion of collecting shoes and resisted the lure of street goth, sports luxe and gorpcore. To these guys, clothes are just something you wear with your kicks — garments only exist to complement your shoes (maybe, if you were to ask these guys about music, they’d say rap music died in the 90s). It’s nerdy, yes, but you’ve got to hand it to the Nike designers, who have designed some truly incredible shoes over the years (my personal favorite is the weird, bulbous Air Jordan 11 — the “Concord” colorway caused actual riots when it dropped in 2011).

The sheer power that sneakers can hold over people is undeniable. Complex’s Sneaker Shopping series, where host Joe La Puma goes shopping with sneakerhead celebrities, regularly draws millions of views on Youtube (this is where Bella Hadid, clutching a pair of Air Max 95s, uttered the immortal line “if homeboy’s rocking these then he’s gonna, like, get it”, one of the most cringe pop culture moments of all time). There’s sneaker podcasts, sneaker conventions, sneaker Facebook groups, sneaker Instagram accounts and, most importantly of all, sneaker resell sites (more on those later).

Of course, the whole thing is not what you’d call sustainable. Footwear is a high-impact category (just think of all that leather), and sneakerheads hoard hundreds of pairs of shoes, many of which are never worn — they just sit in a box somewhere, or maybe on a display shelf wrapped in plastic. It seems even more bizarre when you remember that almost all of these hyped designs are a) decades old and b) very similar to each other (what’s the difference between the AJ1 “Fragment” and “Game Royal”? How about the AJ4 “White Cement” and “Oreo”?). 

I have a lot of fond memories from my time reporting on the sneaker bubble — scroll through the pages of Highsnobiety one day and you’d find Air Force 1s that mimicked Timberland boots, or Engineered Garments’ mismatched, asymmetrical Vans (as with so many things in this world, the best shit comes from Japan). It was a lot of fun writing about the hundreds of new shoes that were dropping at the time, even if I wasn’t much of a kicks guy myself. I had a pair of the Adidas EQT Racing, with a bizarre circular hole in the mesh upper, and some Lanvin sneakers that had a bit of a Raf Simons x Adidas vibe to them (I bought them 50% off from Sneakerboy — RIP — and they fell apart after six months). I tried reselling a couple of times, but I wasn’t very good at it — after the fees, shipping and the rest of it, I only managed to break even on the Undercover x Nike Air React 87s and Supreme Air Max 98s.

But apart from that, my interest in quote-unquote kicks was purely professional. The most interesting thing to me wasn’t the story behind the “Shattered Backboard” AJ1s or the secret to the Air Max 1’s air bubble — it was the dynamics of the resell market, where heads buy and sell rare shoes for profit. 

The market for hype sneakers really exploded in the 2010s. Nike drops got bigger and bigger, as the brand ditched indie streetwear brands and collaborated with Travis Scott, Dior and Tiffany instead. Kanye West’s Yeezy line with Adidas was so huge that at its peak it made up an estimated 7% of the entire company's sales. Resellers were making so much money from flipping all of these hyped shoes that StockX, one of the space’s biggest resell platforms, was once valued at $1bn. 

The problem with the resell market was that it only exists because big brands choose to release limited edition shoes. If Nike and Adidas decide they’re not interested in drops anymore, then the whole thing falls apart. And that’s exactly what’s happened — instead of drip-feeding collabs into the world, Nike dumps millions of pairs of Dunks into its flagships and Foot Locker stores, and Adidas’s hype line has been well and truly canceled. That means the resell space is in trouble — StockX recently laid off 40 employees, while Stadium Goods faces an uncertain future as Farfetch, its parent company, falls apart. Two European platforms, Restocks and Kikikickz, recently filed for bankruptcy too.

Then there’s the fact that millennials have other things on their mind now, like kids and mortgage payments. Guys who used to frantically refresh Nike’s SNKRS app for the latest Dunks have moved onto loafers and boots, or more grown-up sneakers from Asics and Salomon. Across the industry, brands that once relied on hyping up armies of young men seem to be struggling — if it’s quiet in sneaker land these days, then you don’t hear so much from Supreme or BAPE either.