Sneaker Pimps

Air Jordan 11

"The first thing people notice about you is your shoes"
- Anonymous

There's something about walking into a sneaker store. Scanning your eyes from the top to the bottom of the racks to check out the latest kicks. You grab one off the wall, check out its exterior, rotate it, flip it, peer inside, examine the price tag, and admire it in all its glory.

When I was in primary school, I was one of the first kids to be rocking a pair Nike Air Force. Kids would be staring at my kicks and whispering "where did you get them from?". I was quite lucky - a relative in Hong Kong had sent me a pair as a gift. I had no idea the ripple they would cause in the ashphalt playgrounds of primary school.

Soon I graduated to High School and also graduated to Converse. Although Nike was dominating at the time, a kid had to roll differently. Somehow I convinced my mum to buy me a pair of Kevin Johnson Converse React's. Black with blue wavy stripe down the side, the sole contained a yellow blob of react juice. It was supposed to make you jump and play like KJ (that obviously didn't happen).

After the react juice blob fell out of the shoe's sole, I desperately took it to the shoe tailor and pleaded with him to repair it. Unfortunately, I was told it was too expensive to repair and was better off buying a new pair.

Sole to Sole

Distraught from the Converse experience (How could a shoe made in China fall apart like that?), my love affair with Nike was rekindled as I remained loyal to the brand for the next decade. The Nike Air Max shoes had come back into vogue and I must have gone through 3 or 4 pairs of them in high school. You see a kid had to upgrade each year. With each pair, the bubble extended further to encompass the length of the shoe.

Graduating high school, I then moved onto uni and my Nike collection again expanded to include my first pair of casual low cut Nike sneakers: Nike Air Cortez which I still wear today. I could have gone with the Adidias Superstars, but hey I was a Nike man and I was going to stick with them.

Only recently, I have bought my first pair of sneakers that haven't been Nike. A flashy pair of And1's, the new shoe for wannabe ballers.

Even though I don't have an extensive collection of sneakers, I still love the smell of fresh sneakers, reading about them, visiting the old Nike factory at Petersham (RIP), and now the one in Auburn. There's nothing like the feeling of walking into a store searching for a pair of cheap kicks.

Pimp my sneaker

I've spent most of this Sunday afternoon checking out various sneaker websites. I started watching a couple of videos of the top sneaker stores in New York (if you click on the link - scroll down to the bottom and click on the picture of Flight Club, Dave's Quality Meats or ATMOS). The Dimemag crew go to Flight Club in New York, which is a store that sells sneakers on a commission basis. Members of the public bring in their shoes and split the proceeds 80/20 in favour of the seller, so the store keeps 20% of the sale price. The sell their shoes through the vintage kicks website.
Air Jordan 1 Retro

Then there's Dave's Quality Meats, which is a store in New York modeled on a butcher shop style concept. The sneakers are like the prime Cuts, and the t-shirts are on a meat rack. Just watch the video, it explains it better. Of course, Japs do it better with ATMOS. I also came across this store in Boston called Bodega, which is just unreal. The shop front is like a convenience store but hidden in the back is a state of the art sneaker store complete with DJ Booth!

Keeping with the food concept, check out Pharrell's Reebok Ice Creams. You know that line in Drop It like It's Hot where Pharrell says: "Uh! I'm a nice dude, with some nice dreams/See these ice cubes, see these Ice Creams?". And I gotta mention the BAPE shoes (A Bathing Ape). It's a popular Japanese streetwear lable and now mainstream in the US. All the shoes look like they are very similar to Nike Air Force 1's - check'em out.

I'm out like Ice Creams,

DJ Ho.