Sneaker Culture
In the tirelessly suburban city of Miami Lakes, a young college student stared at the racks of multicolored sneakers lining his closet.
“These,” said 20-year-old,Florida International University student Rick Beaudouin, pulling out a box of unscathed skating shoes, “are a pair of $142 Authentics, which was a collaboration between Vans and the Japanese street wear brand, WTAPS.”
He placed them back on the shelf and laughed with a tone of proud obsession.
“Would I spend more than that? Most certainly,” he said. “The feeling of getting a brand new pair of kicks is a euphoric one.”
Sneaker culture is usually defined as a subculture, a faction of the hip hop scene consisting of consumer driven individuals, intent on flaunting their infallible self images by hoarding the most innovative assemblage of sneakers.
As sneaker the industry grew, and as free market capitalism reached the ends of the eastern world, the 70’s based trend has increasingly extended outside of hip-hop, lasting almost three decades and becoming a nearly 30 billion dollar industry.
It encompasses all types of music, art, film, fashion, basketball, skateboarding, breakdance and the like, but it still remains strongly embedded in hip-hop culture. HIstorically, big sneaker companies have signed deals with top hip-hop artists like Run DMC, Jay-Z, 50 cent and a plethora of others.
After browsing through his pairs of Nikes, Beaudouin remembers the first time he became interested in the sneaker scene.
“I’ve been into it since around July of ’07. Some friends of mine had been into it for a long time, and eventually I began to wonder what all the hype was about,” he said. “I remember the first pair of sneakers I wanted to get, the Nike SB Supreme Lows. I had no idea at the time that they ran for about $1000.”
The scene has grown to be a testament for the massive influence popular culture can have on consumer behavior.
Beaudoin’s friend, Joshua Riddle, a former FSU student said although he’s not completely obsessed with sneakers, he’d rather spend most of his money on them than on anything else.
“The first time I got into sneakers I had a lot of expenses entering college,” said Riddle, 21. “I was moving into the dorms, I needed to pay for residence in the dorms, I needed to buy books for college, etc. etc. Even though I knew I had a lot of things I needed to pay for, my first semester, I went ahead and bought four pairs of $90 Nike SB Griptape Mids.”
Riddle added that although he got through the year borrowing money and books, it was still one of the best investments he’s made.
“Those SBs have probably been my longest lasting pair of skating shoes,” he said. “They’ve held up incredibly well.”
But in the sneaker world, money issues are meaningless when compared to other things consumers are willing to do for shoes.
Throughout the 90’s shortly after Michael Jordan popularized the Nike “Air Jordans,” hip-hop artists turned the shoes into a status symbol. The trend soon incited desire among hip-hop fans, which often led to violence.
According to Just for Kicks, the popular 2005 sneaker documentary, “The Air Jordan became the drug dealers and the rappers shoe of choice, worn as a status symbol, and the icon of a flamboyant lifestyle. Rappers passed the craze down to their fans, and in spite of itself, Air Jordan became a hip hop urban brand and the object of unprecedented desire and dangerous attraction on the streets.”
Danny Perez, a Hialeah resident, clearly remembers this time period.
“I remember back when I was in middle school and all the way up through high school, people would get beat-up, jumped, stabbed, whatever, because someone wanted their sneakers,” said Hialeah resident Danny Perez. “I’m in my thirties now, and I don’t really see or hear much about this type of thing anymore, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it still happened.”
The sneaker obsession has not died down.
In fact, the mania escalated in 2005, when Nike, for $300 a pair, released a limited number of “SB Pigeon Dunks,” a version of the Nike Dunk Low Pro skating shoe. However, this “Pigoen Dunk” rare release, came with a picture of a pigeon sewn on the side of the shoe.
The release turned into a mini riot, as a crowd of more several hundred sneaker fans, became desperate to obtain a pair of the limited-release shoes. Some of the crowd members had camped outside of the Upper East Side shoe store in New York city for several days.
Today, that same pair of sneakers sells at the Fight Club New York shoe store for $1,000.
“People will pay thousands of dollars for art, jewelry, sex, drugs” said Beadouin, as he stood next to his closet full of sneakers, “It is what it is. People will do weird things with money and for money. Does popular culture influence them? Yeah sometimes, but people let themselves be influenced.”
For more information on sneaker culture, click on the video below, to access an interesting documentary on the Nike Air Force 1.
