A DUTCH DOCUMENTARY ON SPORTS FOOTWEAR

The majority of documentaries on sports footwear are a bland retread of past glories with the same talking heads telling exactly the same stories. The world doesn’t need some guy in weirdly laced shoes asking people who’ve been queuing for 16 hours, “What is a sneakerhead?”, any more than it needs another Imelda Marcos reference in the opening of an article on collectors and resell. Dull. The much-hyped exhibition in NYC right now looks a little middle-of-the-road too, even if the first part of the book offers a useful primer on the history of athletic shoes Still, there’s a few slept-on productions with some rare footage out there, like Sneakers, a 2004 Dutch production that features Patta brothers and true shoe Jedis Tim and Edson (back when Tim had dreads), some super-dated “cool hunting” (which seemed to fascinate people back then), and some chats with Steve Van Doren, Tinker Hatfield and Nobukazu Kishi from Boon. Like much on the topic from this period, it’s dated, but in a nice way — like over-designed Flash streetwear and shoe websites from the same time frame that don’t work on Wayback Machine. Submarine did a decent job on this 50-minute film, so salutes to whichever kind soul took the time to subtitle this.

SUEDE & LEATHER

I was actually going to up something else here today that I’d written elsewhere, but it probably wouldn’t translate, so I didn’t. That left me with not much to add here that isn’t readily available elsewhere. The last of the holiday block of brie before bedtime had me dreaming about owning this suede jacket from 2000 (fortynos deserves some kind of New Year’s Honours for his services to magazine scanning a few years back) last night. Back then, we were just hunting box logos, hats and sweats and anyway, stuff like this never seemed to make it to the UK anyway — only expensive import copies of Boon and occasionally, Straight No Chaser, ever seemed to let me know these grown-up bits even existed. Now we’re just hypocrites who lambasted a younger generation for doing exactly the same thing. The prospect of NIGO and Tet’s DOUBTFUL AS DOUBLE® line had my ears burning for extra information (I got confused as to whether it was just an exhibition in the Gyre building or a brand, but it’s both) and this Vimeo video is full of Japanese pop-cultural gems from two gents with Kodak memories for moments in magazines when they were on the come-up. This chat with Joe Corre on the subject of menswear from a year ago is good too, despite the terrible sound. Too many great little documents of encounters are hurt by a lack of proper microphone.

RESELLERS

The world of footwear reselling is nothing new. People act like it was invented last week and while the Dunk played a heavy role in resell as we know it, it actually pre-empts the SB. Between 1996 and 1998, local newspapers in the USA were scattered with tales of the goldmine sitting in Americans’ attics, as Japanese kids were willing to spend big on their old shoes. In the mid 1990s, Japan had the shoe boom that never seemed to hit the western world until around half a decade later. The Nike Air Max 95’s role in this was substantial (the Jordan XI played a role too) with the shoe selling out and becoming one of the first shoes beyond the Jordan I or made in France Superstars I ever heard silly resell prices quoted for (though X-Large and Acupuncture were selling all things old school for a fair amount — and the hiked price on obscurities was an age-old phenomenon). In fact, a spate of Japanese AM95 (and, as I recall, AM97) robberies in Osaka even got column inches.

Post AM95 there seemed to be a surge in interest in AJ1s, Terminators, Pythons and mid 1980s basketball, but around 1997/98, the Dunk was the most sought after. That led to the sumo ads (sorry, no Force, Flight, Pegasus, Nike Air, Triax or Zoom — an indicator as to what was hot in Tokyo that year) that did the rounds urging small-town Americans to have a dig and make some money. Above, you can see another example of those ads, via the Grand Rapids-based Small Earth company. I’ve thrown a scattering of the column inches of the time, including a Michigan-based newspaper’s account of the far eastern popularity of their university’s colours on the Dunk.

The documentation of this phenomenon was a little warning (including accounts of unwary owners digging out old Daybreaks, Legends and French-made Concords to make a quick buck, plus Japanese collectors’ ability to spot the difference between 1985 Jordan Is and 1994 ones) about the hype to come, but it’s little surprise that some shelves and lofts were probably dry on the deadstock side of things once America realised it wanted to stock up on colourways too. Stop acting like this is a contemporary phenomenon.

(Image of the Small Earth owners from the Cincinatti Enquirer)