#epic2015

Nike Air Jordan I, 1985. Nike Archives (Photo: Ron Wood).

Not far from my house, at the Brooklyn Museum, is an exhibit called “The Rise of Sneaker Culture”. Ken Johnson, who reviewed the exhibit for the New York Times, notes that the problem with “it is it too much focused on the sneakers themselves (color, design elements, type and brand etc) and not enough on sneaker culture”. That is, on the social and cultural meanings consumers have attributed to and created about sneakers during different times. His point struck a chord for me. In the late 90s, at the height of the Michael Jordan sneaker craze, I spent some months doing commercial ethnographic research on sneaker culture, shuttling back and forth between inner city African American and Hispanic neighborhoods and suburban, often predominately white, subdivisions, talking to people about athletic fashion and most especially about their sneakers. I interviewed collectors, sneakerheads who had closets full of sneakers (these could often discuss the relative merits of a particular pair of sneakers the way an oenophile might discuss vintage wines), moms choosing sneaker styles for their toddlers, suburban slackers and skateboarders, pick-up basketball players, extreme and confidence sports enthusiasts, and others,  mostly young men and women. What really came out of the study was an understanding of the way these different groups and types observed, borrowed from, commented on, and in other ways dialogued with and about each other via the medium of athletic fashion and especially sneakers.