The Kicks You Wear, Vol. 98 — Rotten Tomatoes

The Sneakerheads review y'all asked for

Mike D. Sykes, II

Sep 28, 2020

Good morning, folks! Welcome back to the Kicks You Wear! Thanks for rocking with your boy this Monday.

We’re still on the way to 2,000 subs! Tell your friends to subscribe so we can get this giveaway popping!

Let’s get into it.

Sneakerheads wasn’t really for sneakerheads

(Photo by Stéphan Valentin on Unsplash)

One thing that y’all cannot say about me is that I don’t love you. I watched all six episodes of Complex’s Sneakerheads show on Netflix just to prove it to you.

And, boy, was it corny. It played into every single sneakerhead cliché possible. The outrageous prices. The superfluous hypebeast behavior. Old washed dudes who can’t let go. All of it.

SPOILER ALERT for everything below this point. Here’s the core plot.

The main protagonist, Devin, is trying to buy a pair of Cement 4’s. One problem: His wife won’t let him because his shoe addiction had them broke. But, of course, he sneaks out and tries to get them anyway. And, of course, it ends in disaster.
He doesn’t cop — his pair is backdoored. But he runs into his terrible best friend, Bobby, who convinces him to drop $5,000 on a wild get-rich-quick sneaker scheme. Devin is broke again. To make it back, they try to chase down a mythical (fake) pair of Jordans called the “Zeroes” with a hodge podge group of newfound sneakerhead pals. Basically, it’s Sneaker Ball Z.

It all gets pretty ridiculous. Let’s save those parts for later, though. First, I want to lead with some love. I appreciated actually seeing people in line in real life trying to buy shoes on this show. That was a nice touch. And the showrunners also did phenomenal work in getting some real rare and quality pairs in this show. I also really enjoyed that.

But those things that I loved were also heavily weighed down by the things that I hated. For example, why chase down a fake pair of J’s when they had so many rare joints on set? That was really irritating. This was one of many things in the show that, if you know sneakers, just didn’t make much sense. Adrian Crwaford explains that perfectly here

To me, this discrepancy felt like criticisms of The Fast and The Furious, albeit on a much smaller scale. Modified car enthusiasts back in the early 2000s made fun of the wildly popular movie for corny lines that, to the untrained ear, would sound like “real car stuff” but made absolutely no sense if you had any form of understanding of automotive engineering.

Also, I thought the show made a really poor attempt at relaying exactly why sneakerheads love sneakers the way they do. The thing is, they set it up well!

They tried to use Christine, Devin’s wife, to explain it later in the series. She gets in a situation where she’s chasing down a rare handbag with the help of a sneaker collector. But when she sees the $3,000 price tag she scoffs and walks away. She still doesn’t understand. The thrill of the chase doesn’t matter to her. And so she can’t understand why the Jordan 4’s mean so much to Devin.

But it’s only in the final scene of the season 1 when Devin finally explains to her that the Cement AJ4 was the shoe he wore when he fell in love with her. That’s why he cares so much. So many of us have similar stories. That’s why we’re the way we are. These sneakers aren’t just sneakers — they’re a moment in time.

That really isn’t made clear until the final episode of the series. And that’s way too late. Especially considering that, by the end, they were on the brink of divorce.

Ultimately, this show felt like six episodes of those articles that you read about shoes being sold for $80,000. It was so extreme at every single turn. We were supposed to laugh at the culture and its ridiculous mores instead of with it. And that was disappointing for me.

This was a show that had the opportunity to really showcase sneaker culture to the public and shape the way it’s talked about in the mainstream. It was supposed to help them understand. It didn’t really do that.

But it was probably because it didn’t have enough folks with a great understanding of it involved, anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Warren Lotas strikes again

(Photo by Justin Campbell on Unsplash)

The sneaker community was up in arms on Sunday as Warren Lotas terrorized them with another pair of replica Dunks. This time it’s the OG Staple Pigeons. He “reimagined” them, as he likes to say. Basically, he just removed the Nike trademarks.

The wildest part is that it got the Pigeon stamp. Jeff Staple posted the joint on his Instagram account.

staplepigeon

@warrenlotas 🤝 @staplepigeon
The OG. Official. Reinterpreted by Warren Lotas.
Sept 27th. 3pm EST / 12pm PST
warrenlotas.com

September 27, 2020

A bit of backstory for those of you out of the loop. Lotas, a streetwear designer with a brand in his namesake, is pretty hated in the sneaker community right now for replicating classic SB Dunks.

So far, he’s done the Heineken Dunks, the Cherry Stussy joints after that and, on Sunday, he did the OG Pigeons.
This isn’t a Nike collab. He’s taking the design and making it his own. There are slight tweaks — no Nike on the back, the Jason mask replacing the swoosh. The color shades and measurements are also slightly different.

People are pissed about this, and it’s hard to blame them. Lotas is taking classic models they love, tweaking them to remove trademarks and selling them at $300 a pop. That doesn’t really feel right.

But here’s the other side of that. No one complained about the Bape Stas in 2000. No one complains about Virgil and Off-White. This is the same concept. It’s all unoriginal, but these are a problem? I don’t buy it.

I don’t like this. I don’t want those shoes. But I’m not going to fault anyone who does and I’m not going to condemn Lotas for doing it. This is what design is and has always been. There’s not much original out there.

All this needs is the right endorsement from someone, and it’ll be quiet. If Travis Scott ever wore these (and he won’t) people would love em.

With that being said you have to wonder we're never getting a Nike SB x Staple collab again.

Again, this is not a Nike approved. And the swoosh doesn't generally take kind to copies like this.
Staple still very clearly gave his co-sign, though. And I can't imagine Nike would be happy with that either.

But whatever. Creators create. Nike will be fine and so will Staple. And if they iight, the rest of us will be, too.

The Jordan 35 is pretty good

A few weeks ago on this platform I came on here and roasted the Jordan 35. It didn’t look that great to me in the Fragment colorway. And if it didn’t look good as a Fragment shoe, it certainly couldn’t look good as a regular shoe, right?

Sheesh was I wrong. This is a good looking shoe. Jordan Brand officially unveiled it last week and the color palettes are spectacular — particularly this Bred joint.

Nick DePaula @NickDePaula

Rui Hachimura’s “Warrior” Air Jordan 35 will release on October 21. The Kanji-inspired samurai logo on the shoe was designed by his mom and honors their family name.

Really digging these, man. This easily has one of the better Jordan looks over the last decade or so. It’s a solid mix of aesthetic and performance. And it has the Nightwing2303 stamp, for good measure.