KYW Holiday Special — 🍾 The best (and worst!) of 2022
Can you believe it's the last week of the year? Sheesh.
Goooood morning, family. Welcome back to the Kicks You Wear. Thank you so much for rocking with me today and all year long. If you just got hip to KYW, thanks for giving me a shot. Hope you’re enjoying it so far!
Housekeeping: This is KYW’s last send of 2022! I’ll miss y’all. Have a happy holiday season and a Happy New Year. The newsletter will be back on January 9.
Now let’s jump in.
Sneaker of the year: Concepts’ “Message to the Universe” pack
This is sort of cheating because I couldn’t settle one just one sneaker from this pack. I just chose the entire thing. It was that good.
The why: These sneakers hit all of the right notes a limited drop should. I’ve got three big categories I pay attention to when it comes to this stuff: Aesthetics, hype and the rollout. Everything else falls into place behind that.
Aesthetically: There’s no question that these are fantastic. The Air Max 1 is a classic silhouette. It’s hard to make it feel new. This drop did that by using materials we’ve never seen on an Air Max 1 before. It reinvented a classic, and not in the corny way.
Hype: Folks were looking forward to these joints as soon as the calendar flipped to 2022. It felt natural. People’s excitement persisted throughout the year — you’ve still got folks posting about these shoes. The mark of a true classic.
The rollout: Concepts set a very high bar for itself with these. They used dummy sites for each drop. It didn’t work for everyone, but there were plenty of manual cops to go around.
Sidenote: This is why it’s so confounding that the Lobster drop was so awful.
The other side: There’s an easy case to be made against these joints as sneaker of the year. This is the Air Max 1 — not a 2022 silhouette. How can it be sneaker of the year if it didn’t even release in this year?
That’s why I think there’s a legitimate argument to be made for Joe FreshGoods’ Inside Voices 9060 here.
It’s the best actual *new* shoe that dropped this year. It’s not a retro and it captured the culture in the same ways this Air Max 1 did.
Ultimately, I still picked the Air Max 1. It was just so different. It completely shifted the Air Max 1 into something we haven’t seen before. It felt like it was new. And that put it over the hump for me.
The big picture: I do think we need more new silhouettes to come along and capture us like the 9060 did. And I want to give that shoe all the credit in the world for being something so vastly different than what we’ve seen before.
But nah. These Air Max 1s are it.
Collaborator of the year: Joe FreshGoods
Speaking of the 9060, what a feather that joint was in Joe FreshGoods’ cap for 2022. Dude just couldn’t miss.
A quick recap:
JFG dropped three collaborations with two different brands. He released the “Inside Voices” and “Performance Art” drops with New Balance and the “Honey Moon stage” drop with Vans.
He also creatively directed his first New Balance project on the “Conversations Amongst Us” drop.
There were plenty of collaborators out there to choose from. Ronnie Fieg and Kith, James Whitner and the Whitaker Group’s various brands, Aime Léon Dore. None of them quite captured our attention as well or as often as Joe FreshGoods did this year.
What made him special: He did it by telling us Black stories. Stories about communication and taking pride in art and creation.
These are stories New Balance is new to. This culture is literally the polar opposite of what the brand was once known for.
Now it feels like there’s a hint of Joe FreshGoods in almost everything New Balance does. The insane color palettes, the carefully crafted storytelling, the Blackness. It’s all there.
The downside: Man. Those Instagram drops were hell, weren’t they? It got better toward the tail end of 2022, but the 9060 drop was awful. And that’s a huge mark considering it’s one of the best sneakers of the year.
All in all, though, JFG still had a fantastic year. And he did some fantastic work. Hopefully, it continues in 2023.
The theme of the year “Other”
Look, I’m well aware that the most hyped shoe of the year was an Air Jordan 1. But, man. Didn’t it feel good to care about silhouettes that weren’t Dunks or Jordans? Or how about brands that weren’t just Nike?
This was the year of the other: There were other mainline silhouettes and other brands, entirely, that wrote the story of sneaker culture in 2022.
Some of the biggest drops of the year came from places like New Balance, Asics, Hoka and more.
Y’all were even out here wearing Crocs! I stood in line for hours to get. Some. CROCS.
That would’ve been an insane sentence to type in 2019. But this is where we are now as a culture and I absolutely love it.
This will continue: Nike will always be the sneaker industry’s leader. That’s never going to change. But the landscape we live in has made it possible for this embrace of variety to exist.
These sneakers are still hard to buy. Demand isn’t going to meet supply on the hottest drops and that’s just always going to be a thing.
But on top of that, costs have risen, too. And it’s led people to searching for alternatives.
That’s a good thing. The more variety, the better. Though I will say, man. Y’all gotta stop with the Crocs.
Highest Climber: Asics
I hesitate to call the year Asics had quiet, but that’s what it felt like. That’s by design, though. Asics’ resurgence has been one for the books.
Where they were: When Shigeyuki Matsui retired in 2020, the brand retired the four OG colorways of its hippest silhouette in the Gel-Lyte III along with him. That’s a great way to honor him, but also a big gamble. That silhouette is a money maker.
Where they are: They’ve bounced back just fine and have turned the spotlight on a few other silhouettes that got plenty of love this year.
They dropped hot collabs on models like the Gel-1130, the Gel-Kayano line, Gel-Nimbus line and Gel-Sonoma to spark interest.
Asics also dropped something new in the bucket with the EX-89 that looks like it could be special in 2023.
No, Asics isn’t Nike or Adidas. It will never be that. But, truthfully, it doesn’t need to be. It’s niche audience will continue to hold it up and that’s what matters most.
Biggest drop: Adidas
It goes without saying that this was an absolute disaster of a year for Adidas. It begins and ends with Kanye West.
Here’s the deal: We don’t need to rehash the punishment or talk about his behavior any more than we already have. But the facts are the facts and, man, Yeezy was a moneymaker for the brand.
By the numbers: Adidas is dropping 250 million euros annually by dropping Kanye West.
There’s no replacing Kanye West. But Adidas doesn’t need to — it should figure out how to live without him first.
West’s Yeezy business was more important in the cultural stream of consciousness than Adidas actually was. That’s a negative.
On the flip side, you could never say that about Nike. No one collaborator is taking the spotlight from the swoosh. Michael Jordan might be considered the only one, but he’s a company man.
Adidas needs to establish its foundation first before allowing a collaborator to run wild. I wrote more about that in our holiday mailbag.
This is going to be a huge year for Adidas. We’ll see if they play their cards right.
The “nah, you dead ass?” award goes to
Nocta and Nike’s Hot Step Air Terra. I’m still not sure what this shoe is or what it even exists for. Does Drake even wear these?
For those of you out of the look, it’s the Nike joints that look like K-Swiss joints. Or a dinosaur head. Whichever one of those two things resonates with you more. Here’s a look.
Let’s leave these in 2022. Cool? Cool.
#TheKicksWeWear for one last time in ‘22
So for today’s TKWW, I asked everyone to come through with their favorite pair from the year. And y’all SHOWED OUT. The entire thread is here and it’s ALL HEAT.
My boy E Thorpe popped out with the Phillies Dunks. One of the cleanest SBs you’ll ever see, man.
The homie Storm came through with ALL her heat for the year. So fire, man.
My guy Musa popped out in my favorite SBs. The Golden Hour Crushed DC Dunks are a pair for the books, man.
The homie Rick Dubb popped out with SO. MANY. BANGERS. My boy put up numbers this year, y’all.
So did the homie Candace, who popped out in the Lost & Founds. These are always going to be so sick to me.
My dog Adrian popped out with his legit grail fresh out the box. Shouts to the Lobster Dunks.
Then the homie Ben sent us home with his baby boy, who was stoked to get this fresh pair of AF1s for Hanukkah. We absolutely love to see this, man. This is what it’s all about.
Y’all bring so much light to my world with this. Thank you thank you thank you. SMOKED IT.
Thank you so much for rocking with me, family. I appreciate y’all. You’re the absolute best. I’ll be back in January with a review of my 2022 primer from last year. We’ll go over what I got right, what I got wrong and talk about predictions for the industry in 2023.
Have a review for KYW’s year? Leave it here on this form! Thanks in advance for your input.
Y’all have a fantastic new year. Peace and love. Be easy, be safe, be kind. And we out.
-Sykes💯
The Concept Air Max 1’s are maybe my favorite shoes I’ve ever owned TBH