Back in 2020 we had to chuck the kids’ baby shoes out 😱, so I decided to keep the first ones and draw the rest, in order, starting with pre-walking socks.
When I look at photos of my kids from when they were younger, my eye is always drawn to their shoes and clothes — some of them are so iconic in my mind they almost function as logos for my kids at different stages.
Buying vintage and collectible sneakers online has become so complicated that a secondary industry has sprung up. Programmers create bots to outbid humans at auction. Initially, these were used just to snap up shoes to be sold at a markup on secondary markets. Eventually, though, enterprising botmakers realized they could avoid having to deal with shoes altogether by selling their bots to thirsty sneakerheads directly. At Complex, Tommie Battle breaks it down:
It’s now seen as a must that you need a bot. Copping “manually” is a risky endeavor—a misstep in entering credit card info or your address could mean that the item that was once on its way to being delivered to your door is now swept from under your virtual feet. That very sequence has happened to so many customers at this point that it’s now a part of the release date experience, and there is seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel.
The exclusivity will always be there in the world of streetwear, and it’s quite possible that the exclusivity is what drives brands to stay the course in regards to how they handle not only the availability, but the probability of purchasing their product. After all, the hype doesn’t follow every sneaker. The issue remains that the playing field must be even, especially in the digital realm. The old phrase is that the customer is always right, but what happens if the customer is a mindless bot?
The main question I have is this: what other economies have been disrupted by bots? Presumably, the rest of the collectors’ markets haven’t been untouched by this. The fundamental technologies and principles are basically the same. Entertainment, too, in the form of tickets to events, anything else sold by auction or to the first bidder. But how deep does it go? How far has the rot spread?
Chris Donovan loved designing women’s shoes, so he quit his job as a telephone repairman and followed his fashion design dreams all the way to Florence. What a great video from AARP, filmed by David Friedman. You can see more of Donovan’s work on his Instagram account. (via @mathowie)
That is a bespoke running shoe made by a small company started by Hitoshi Mimura, who is considered one of the top shoe designers in the world. Mimura had great success at Asics, outfitting Olympic gold medal runners with shoes lighter, grippier, and more breathable than those worn by competitors, but now he has struck out on his own.
“I take 13 measurements of the foot, each foot has to be measured separately,” explains the sensei of shoemaking. “I only trust hand-measuring. Currently, each shoe takes about three weeks to make, mainly due to determining which materials to use.” Preparation is also key. “For a world championships or Olympics I check the course once or twice. I went to Beijing three times.”
A NY Times feature on Mimura written before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing emphasized the designer’s reliance on rice husks in the soles for grippiness. Mimura takes his job and his responsibility to the runners very seriously:
Surreptitiously, Mimura made soles of two slightly different thicknesses, to compensate for the fact that Takahashi’s left leg was eight millimeters — about a third of an inch — longer than her right leg. She had tried a pair of the uneven soles before the Sydney Olympics, but felt uncomfortable.
Still, Mimura felt Takahashi needed such shoes to win and to avoid a recurrence of pain caused by the disparity in her legs. Without Takahashi’s knowledge, Mimura gave her the uneven soles, then wrote a letter of resignation, in case she failed to win gold.
“I decided to take full responsibility because I made this pair against her wishes,” Mimura said of the letter. “I didn’t have to hand it over. It’s still in my desk.”
That is belief in yourself and in your craft. Many people believe in “giving people not what they want but what they need” but how many of them will put their livelihood on the line for it?
Nike has designed a soccer shoe for Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo that uses a striped pattern on one side of the shoe designed to confuse opponents as to which way Ronaldo might be moving his feet.
The cleats look remarkably different from each side of Ronaldo. From the right, they have a clean look with pinstripes. From the left, though, there are thick stripes with a red accent line. Furthermore, the asymmetrical design makes a defender’s judgment that much harder, as the visual effect of Ronaldo turning his foot in one direction may not come across exactly the same as reality.
Reminds me of the dazzle camouflage used on military ships in WWI and WWII.
Around All-Star time a couple of weeks ago, Nike released a shoe called the Nike Trash Talk, “the first Nike performance basketball sneaker completely produced from manufacturing waste”. The shoe, worn by Steve Nash in a recent game, looks a bit like Frankenstein’s monster with all the exposed stitching; it’s a beautiful shoe and I want a pair. The problem is that it’s one of those limited edition deals…which means they’re already all sold out and sitting on the shelves of sneaker collectors next to hundreds of other boxes of shoes that will never be worn. I looked on eBay and found two pair but not in my size. What are my chances of getting a pair of these at approximately retail price? I’m not looking for a collectors item…I just want to wear them!
This one guy tried to get the word “sweatshop” printed on his custom Nike shoes and Nike wouldn’t let him. “The Personal iD on my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes was the word ‘sweatshop.’ Sweatshop is not: 1) another’s party’s trademark, 2) the name of an athlete, 3) blank, or 4) profanity. I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately.”
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