A TIME BEFORE HYPE

This entry is part of an inadvertent trilogy. Sports footwear rarely crops up too heavily here (there’s other outlets for that), but having bemoaned the lack of release for Wieden+Kennedy’s ‘Sneakerhead’ documentary and the demise of San Francisco’s Harputs, how about a moment for a more innocent age of advertising, as America and Canada’s local papers hawked some shoes deemed classic nowadays in a variety of ways? Seeing as the inbox is trembling under the weight of any number of hastily cobbled together and cynically synthesised “virals,” there’s always time to look at some ’70s and ’80s artworking.

There’s a glorious lack of reverence for the subject matter. No self-referential nonsense, and no knowing smirks, with retailers given an evident freedom to sell these as pure performance pieces, rather than retrospective objects-of-obsession. Nike Pegasus “BLEMS”? Bermudas hawked alongside microwaves? Hunting safety classes booked while copping adidas Conductors? The cruder the artwork, the more appealing it becomes. I’m fully sold on the Nike “Air-Port.” Wieden+Kennedy were top of their game at this point, but there’s a charm to each of these matter-of-fact creations that’s enough to revive my occasionally lagging love for the subject matter. Sadly I’ve mislaid the 1985 one where a store can barely give away those pesky “Nike Jordan Canvas” -even for the grand total of $20.

It’s a barometer as to how far things have come when this pure approach to hawking product is infinitely more appealing than the round edges and winks of contemporary marketing. The shelves are heaving with books on the topic of training shoes…sneakers…whatever you want to call them, but even if your love is dead, dying or barely there in the first place, seek 2005’s ‘Blue Ribbons’ book made in conjunction with Nike Japan, and authored by Mr. Takatoshi Akutagawa. Fully translated, it’s beautifully written, has a mine of information I’ve never seen anywhere else, and is flawlessly designed.

Looking at the price hike on old ‘Free & Easy’ back issues, it might have skyrocketed in price, but if you see it sub-£30, invest or regret. The jump-off for Nike’s VNTG line, and just preceding the BRS Air Max release, it’s a perfect guide to the golden age of Nike running. This video from The Shoe Game is devoid of the usual stuttering bluster from no-nothings or the usual band of single branders – Khalli’s got knowledge and some interesting pieces. Less sure about LA Gear, but the Lendls? Boom. The circulated video of the Parisian apartment with the Nike Elton Johns in the mix still takes the crown. I’m not a collector, just an appreciator, and in the case of these ads, there’s a certain joy in seeing sacred cows being treated like cattle feed.

As a major tangent, but a necessary one, seeing as I’ve been getting steadily more and more excited about the release of this Australian crime thriller. For ‘Animal Kingdom’, the great trailer is nicely complemented by this superior poster art. Bring it on.

NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S ONLINE ARCHIVE

Last year if you were short of a blog post inspiration you could just go and plunder LIFE’s image archives or go steal something from A Continuous Lean or The Selvedge Yard and add your own half-baked commentary on it. You could also up a lookbook that had been posted several times already, again, with a sprinkling of pointless opinion. But Google Books – aka. the print industry’s nemesis (don’t worry print, techno-book won’t replace pulped trees in my affections any time soon) just made blogs even easier. I plead guilty to abusing this online resource. Vibe’s up there almost in its entirety (a few holes in the mid ’90s), as is Spin, but the crown jewel is New York Magazine’s back catalogue. Shouts to Sofarok for putting me onto some pieces from the magazine’s past pages last year. It still packs a kick, with some excellent writing – the KAWS cover last year and the Dash Snow piece a few years prior were good, but over the years its been in the proximity of some zeitgeist moments by mere blocks, while we wannabes were soaking it up from a distance.

GWARIZM relevant highlights of a casual browse? A Valentines issue from February 1986 with the romantic tale of Futura 2000 and then-wife Christine Carrie, a tiny piece on Supreme from May 1994, a couple of weeks after the store opened, some coverage of the Phillies Blunt phenomenon from August 1992, a lengthy Ralph Lauren interview that’s actually picked from a conversation from the out-of-print, but pretty good (get your Amazon Marketplace on and you’ll find it for a penny plus P&P) ‘Fashion: The Inside Story’ by Barberalee Diamonstein on Rizzoli from October 1985. Mark “Search all issues” and bookend your terms with speech marks to stumble across gem after gem. Considering the excellent Rolling Stone magazine archive cost around £40, that New York Magazine hands it over like this for nada is a major bonus. You want more? Hunt down Craig Unger’s ‘Attitude’ article from July 1982, Unger’s ‘The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood’ piece from May 1984, ‘Prep-School Gangsters’ by Nancy Jo Sales from December 1996 and ‘Hard-Core Kids’ by Peter Blauner from May 1986.

But the absolute best part of a trawl is Anna Wintour’s work as then-fashion editor of New York Magazine between 1981 and 1983. There’s a lot of reasons why she commands such respect, but look to the ‘New York, New York’ shoot from March 1982 to see Ali, Dondi White and Zephyr getting involved – also note the use of a bike courier in the same shoot – prescient of the current editorial clichés used in efforts to look edgy. Go article hunting right now, right here.

But I’m conscious I’m dwelling on the old, so here’s a new concept – retrospective offsetting. To counteract the old stuff revisited, here’s some newness that gets me hyped:

ARC’TERYX VEILANCE GORE-TEX ENVELOPE

I heard about this method of promoting the excellent Arc’teryx Veilance line at Capsule earlier this year. Conceptually a GORE-TEX envelope sounds like something Ghostface would mention in a lyric back when he spat lines like “Meet the black Boy George, dusted on my honeymoon/Bitch like my wife, she popped my Ghostface balloon.” As a result I needed to own this. Steve Mann kindly gave me one of these oddball promo artifacts. That the envelope inside it tough to remove is irrelevant – this is one of the best pieces of PR ephemera this year, and when the year is out, you’ll all be cock jocking Veilance. Trust me on that one.

‘ANIMAL KINGDOM’

Australia should, with that hazy, slightly sweaty atmosphere that comes built in with any motion picture shot in any of the country’s suburbs, churn out some brilliant crime films, but bar ‘Chopper’ and the deeply disturbing but necessary ‘The Boys’ (hunt it down if you can stomach it), the curse of the knockabout Guy Ritchie twattisms meant films like ‘Two Hands’ and ‘The Hard Word’ fell short despite their potential. Post ‘Underbelly’ there should have been a new breed of flicks. With good buzz after a Sundance showing last Summer, the Melbourne-based ‘Animal Kingdom’ looks intelligent, beautifully shot and deadly serious. This full-length trailer is slickly edited, culminates with a nice matter-of-fact typeface and uses Air Supply’s ‘I’m All Out Of Love’ to winning effect. do we have a potential classic on our hands?

NIKE SFB MID BOOT

Nike seem intent on getting you excited with their new releases if you got bored to tears with the Air Max 1 tsunami (Patta are the exception to that boredom) – the SFB Mid Boot is a more crowdpleasing use of the military technology the brand’s been pushing and it’s another Free soled classic in the making. Is it getting a UK release? Apparently not. This is to the Revaderchi what the Wildedge was to the Wildwood, even if, wisely, it steers clear of anything corny like ‘Air Revaderchi 2010’, it’s an update of both versions of the whimsically titled ACG release. Ace.