Truth is, they’ve never really left the box! Even the wedding wasn’t special enough.īack in 1997, I paid $3,500 for a pair of Reeboks with the number written in Chinese on the side – it was so cool to have that rare shoe. I once won a pair of Nike What The Dunk sneakers in a raffle – a special edition, so special I saved it for my graduation, and then wedding. I buy in multiples one to wear, one for spare one to invest, one to trade. NowI have shoes that I don’t touch, perfectly preserved in boxes. I’d wear the shoes to basketball courts, play in them, damage them – I didn’t care back then until I became a serious collector in 2000. I just wanted to look cool and stand out in the crowd. I was in school when I first started buying shoes. I have no idea how many pairs of shoes I have – I stopped counting years ago. “SALTY EGG, ”MULTI-MEDIA ARTIST © Provided by PrestigeOnline When the fans become industry leaders there’s a shift – a real change occurs.
Virgil Abloh was a sneakerhead, and now he’s the creative head of a brand. They have a say in it: genuine fans are changing the products and the marketplace. What’s been incredible about my account is that I can see how genuine sneakerheads are now influencing the fashion industry. But Japan in general – whether brick-and-mortar stores or online – is definitely a paradise for sneakerheads.Ī lot of people follow my shoe Instagram account ( – fashion designers, fans from Finland or Malaysia, American actors – but I honestly have no idea who they are until friends point them out to me. If you can’t speak Japanese or you don’t have a Japanese address, you need to have a third party to buy from sites such as Yahoo Japan. There’s a massive trading market of shoes online, especially on Japanese sites, but they’re complicated to navigate. The brands’ popularity and profits may fluctuate, but the culture keeps going up. Whether it’s Nike Jordans or Adidas, it has its own mini universe. It’s really important for a shoe to have a good story, more than ease or comfort or even style. Over the years, I think I’ve spent HK$3 million on collecting shoes and I’ll probably spend more – and with no regrets. But shoe addicts will understand this passion. I feel some shoes should belong in Hong Kong and I want them back, and I don’t want them to leave the city – that’s the kind of love I have for them. Whenever I am selling something really important in my collection and I know it’s leaving Hong Kong, I’m wary about it. You can’t put shoes in any particular economic model as they’re such an emotional investment. Sometimes, really nice stuff doesn’t sell, or too many of a particular shoe got made, so people didn’t want it. Air Jordans we thought would be hot forever, but even they went down in popularity for a while. You have to understand that sneakers aren’t just a one-model or single-style kind of culture, something that might be hot for a year or two, like the Yeezy, and then go down. Even in China, young people are buying Nikes and Yeezys, not just designer shoes. I’ve been collecting for a long time and over the years, I just see them going higher and higher and higher. Even during the pandemic, sneaker culture was on the rise. It’s not like watches or other commodities, where the market is volatile and changes depend on the economy – local and global. Where do I see sneaker culture going? Only up. It’s so much more than a hobby – we devote so much of our life to it. When people said they had many boxes of shoes in mint condition that they’d never opened, let alone worn, I totally understood that kind of obsession.
When we hosted the panel at K11 to talk about shoes, I learned much from the audience questions. I’ve been buying and collecting shoes all my adult life and I can’t tell you how many pairs I have.
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Jeff Cheung wearing the Nike Dunk Low Pro Sb, Nyc Pigeon JEFF CHEUNG, CO-FOUNDER OF SOLEADDICT © Provided by PrestigeOnline We record an oral history of the humble accessory that’s now a blue-chip commodity. No one in high fashion paid attention to sneakers in the ’80s, but, with prices for prize examples going stratospheric, look at them now. We talked to five collectors and experts about being Sneakerheads and the fascinating universe of sneaker culture.
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