Sunday Life

Would You Pay $480 For This Shoe?

Don't throw out your old trainers just yet - you could be standing in a small fortune. Lara Zamiatin meets the sneaker collectors who are doing some serious sole searching.

An unassuming sneaker nicknamed the Homer appeared in a handful of stores in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in the first week of March. White and sky blue with a yellow swoosh, the limited-edition trainer looked modest enough but in the world of sneakers, looks can be deceiving. In just one hour, all 800 pairs in the country sold out.

Sneaker aficionado Hans-Donovan Cheong was visiting a friend in Melbourne's Evolve when he witnessed a lengthy queue forming outside the skate wear shop. Customers were restricted to two pairs each but in 20 minutes, he saw 55 Nike Homers go. "Kids were buying theirs and offering people on the street money to buy them a couple more pairs," says Cheong, a 29-year-old store manager. "There was real desperation but chaos happens every time there's an in-demand trainer out."

And the chaos is escalating if the networks of so-called sneakerologists are to be believed. It's four years since Naomi Klein's book No Logo spilt the beans on sneaker manufacturers and their sweatshops but the revelations, while universally deplored by sneaker collectors, haven't deterred aficionados from spending their lives chasing rare pairs. Apart from its 36,000 registered users, the British sneaker-related website CrookedTongues.com, received 18,862,667 hits last December. Simon Wood, aka Woody, who runs the Melbourne-based SneakerFreaker.com, launched a magazine of the same name in November 2002; with its fourth issue due in July, it has a dedicated readership of 7000.

Cheong says the value of his 250-pair sneaker collection is well into the thousands of dollars. But that's small fry compared to those of a select few Americans who are rumoured to have more than $US100,000 ($135,000) worth of trainers in their cupboards. "Nearly all of them are worn," says Cheong of his beloved collection, which includes pairs to wear, others to trade and some still pristine in their boxes. "It takes the value away."

When it comes to the Homer - only 3000 pairs of which exist worldwide - Nike's recommended retail price was $170 but on eBay, the sneaker is going for a whopping $US350 ($480) a pop. Officially called the Nike Dunk Low Pro SB, it's a reissue of Nike's iconic 1985 Dunk model. But, like all sneakers, the humble Homer is essentially leather and suede tacked onto rubber. So how did it create such mind-boggling hype?

The story began last year when Nike Australia's footwear product line manager, Matt Jenkinson, briefed the powers-that-be at Nike's Oregon HQ on a design inspired by the classical Greek text Homer's Odyssey. He asked his wife, Natalie, to draw a childlike illustration of a Cyclops, the one-eyed Sicilian monsters of Greek mythology. Jenkinson dreamt up the colour combination, Natalie's Cyclops was placed on the shoe's zoom air sock liner and, following Nike's approval, Jenkinson's baby went into production.

In October, Jenkinson gave Wood the world-exclusive pictures of the Homer for his website. Within days, chat rooms on sneaker websites were buzzing with Homer-related stories. Rumours circulated about just how limited the shoes were and where you could get them. Before long, the trainer came to be associated with another Homer: the loveable couch potato of The Simpsons fame.

Meanwhile, pumping further hot air into the hype, Nike started feeding information on the Homer to its ground crew of sneaker obsessives such as Cheong. "We tell Nike what the kids are into, what's hot and what they want and Nike tells us what's coming out," says Cheong. "If you speak to the right people, they tell their mates and the word spreads like wildfire." By the time the Homer hit the shops, it was much more than a simple sneaker; it was a phenomenon.

"At the end of the day it's just a shoe," says Wood. "But when you tell a story such as the nature of the colors or the style or that it's part of a series, you're building a mythology and it becomes very alluring."

Such myth-making only extends to old-school sneakers. The futuristic-looking current ones, with all their high-tech fabrics, Velcro straps and gas-filled shock absorbers, might look comfortable but most sneakerphiles have resisted them. And the big-brand manufacturers have heeded the vintage calling. Over the past few years, they've been diligently re-releasing limited-edition replicas of classics that include - to name just a few - Nike's Air Jordans, Blazers and Waffle Racers, Puma's Suede's and Brushspikes, Reebok's Pumps and Adidas's Rod Lavers.

"It's an opportunity to buy what you feel you were deprived of in childhood," says Wood, recalling a "mortifying" incident as a teenager when his mother bought him chocolate and tan Adidas Romes instead of the desired blue and white ones. "For thirty-somethings and over, vintage shoes let you reminisce over your high-school days," says Jenkinson.

When it comes to icons, the Adidas Superstar lives up to its name. Famous for its rubberized shell toe, the streamlined trainer will forever be linked to the legendary 70s basketball player Abdul Jabbar. A decade later, US hip-hop outfit Run DMC - decked out in Adidas trainers and trakkies - sang the line, "We make a good team, my Adidas and me," from the trainer anthem My Adidas. Adidas rewarded the hip-hop crew's Superstar fixation by releasing a special Run DMC model.

"When celebrities wear a brand, it generates instant recognition and triggers a frenzy for the product," says Joe Tricarico, the senior product manager for Adidas Australia. Hip-hop queen Missy Elliott's new fashion label, Respect Me - a collaboration with Adidas - will no doubt feed the hoopla when the clothing, footwear and bling are released in November.

But there exists yet another group of too-cool-for-school brands that have virtually no marketing budgets and which build hype by actively deflecting attention. It's these brands that, when they work with the big companies, add inestimable cachet to the goods. One of last year's most successful trainers was the $170 Supreme Dunk Low. A collaboration between Nike and the New York-based skateboarding company Supreme, the shoe has more than quadrupled in value on the Melbourne-based online store RareAirShoes.com.

"There's a whole cult of not trying too hard," says Wood. "If Supreme don't like the look of you, they won't let you in the shop. They don't bother with a website. They're rude to everyone and they release stuff whenever they feel like it. People just lap it up."

The cult Japanese street wear label A Bathing Ape works on the same principle. When Japanese sneaker fans read in the style magazine Smart last year of a collaboration between Adidas and the company to produce very-limited-edition trainers, overnight people starting lining up outside A Bathing Ape stores even though the story never mentioned a release date. When the shoes - renditions of the Superstar - finally went on sale, all 500 pairs of one $139 model sold out in 19 minutes.

"It's an obsession. I hate thinking about it," says David Skop, the proprietor of RareAirShoes.com. "It's boys with toys. It's like cars but the difference is that boys put them on their feet to zoom around in."
 

By Lara Zamiatin
1,296 words
13 June 2004
Sun Herald
24
English
© 2004 Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited  www.smh.com.au

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