‘Instant credibility’: The evolution of sneakers from functional kicks to high-value commodities

This is Li-Anne — otherwise known as “Monsieur Banana”.

She’s an influencer and a self-professed sneakerhead:

(noun INFORMAL): a person who collects, trades, customises or admires sneakers as a hobby or a career.

“How many sneakers do I have? I’m actually scared to count,” she laughs.

“I started counting and got to 50 in just one section, so I stopped. I’m going to say … just under 200? Not too many.”

But these sneakers are not your everyday pair used for playing basketball or going to the gym.

These sneakers can sell for up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, often to clients who don’t even play sports, and often never even get worn.

Sneakerheads

Some readers may have crossed paths with sneakerheads, queuing or camping overnight outside a retailer in their hundreds ahead of a new release, hoping to get their hands on a coveted pair.

Monsieur Banana is one of those people.
“In 2015, I was so dedicated to getting this pair of Yeezy 350 [Adidas shoes] … I went to a camping store, bought a camping chair and lined up overnight,” she says.

“When the Yeezy hype was at its peak, there were people lining up for probably two or three days.

“It was crazy.”

But what Monsieur Banana is describing is just a tiny tip of the iceberg.

As kids around the world beg, steal or borrow to snap up their dream shoes, corporations and celebrities are raking it in, marking up shoes to sometimes 10,000 times the cost of manufacturing, creating an industry worth tens of billions of dollars.

• “I have no idea how some of these kids are affording [these shoes],” Melbourne sneaker store manager Jayden Traynor says.

• “It seems like kids now are either starting jobs younger, or parents are more willing to pay for these things.”

• “They want to fit in at school. They want to have things other kids have. And parents don’t want them to miss out. So it’s really massive.”

And now in 2023, physical sneakers are going digital, with Nike, Adidas and many others creating digital shoe companies to trade highly expensive “virtual” sneakers — in the form of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) — that can’t even be worn, but exist solely in the digital space.

But how did it get like this? How did a pair of smelly throwaway sports shoes become such a highly sought-after commodity, that kids are now saving to buy digital shoes they can’t even wear?

First, it’s important to understand how a pair of physical sneakers can cost so much in the first place.

The popularity of sneakers dates back to the 19th century when a couple of shoe companies started making rubber-soled shoes for athletes in Europe.

“If people are old enough to remember, sneakers were basically sporting goods equipment,” American sneaker and streetwear designer Jeff Staple says.

“You buy sneakers at the same store you buy a baseball bat, a tennis racket and ice skates, and you wore the sneaker to play a sport in.

“Then when the sneakers were destroyed, because you played so much sport, you threw the sneaker away and you bought another.”

The pivotal move

But a cultural transformation began to occur in the 1980s, when cable television was growing in popularity, amplifying the power of sports, music and movies.

This coincided with Nike’s pivotal 1984 move to increase its basketball shoe market share, then dominated by Converse, by signing a shoe deal with then-unknown Chicago Bulls rookie Michael Jordan.

While Converse and Adidas were trying to get Jordan to promote their existing shoe models, Nike created a special sneaker line — the “Air Jordan”.

• “There’s reason to call Michael Jordan ‘the god of basketball’,” says Michael Fan, who owns one of the biggest sneaker collections in Australia.

• “It was the Air Jordan 1 that started the whole continuation of sneaker culture.”

• “[Jordan] had absolute dominance on the court, a kind of unconquerable character.

• “But the character was a double-edged sword — particularly aggressive, but never gives up in any situation.”

Until the Air Jordans, only white shoes were permitted on courts in the NBA, and so the NBA fined Jordan $US5,000 ($7,700) per game for wearing them — in response, Nike chose to foot the bill, allowing this “double-edged sword” to be embodied in his shoes.

Amid the Air Jordan hype, the cultural influence of sneakers was already spreading beyond the sports field, transcending the scope of functionality.

“Something happened in the early 90s,” Jeff says.

• “Different people who were into different elements of culture, such as music, hip hop, rock, punk rock, and skateboarding, started to get into sneakers and use them not to play the sport, but to express themselves.”

“Whether they were playing guitar or breakdancing on stage, performing, people started to wear sneakers to do activities they’d previously wear dress shoes for — when you go to a club, on a date, out on the town.

“That barrier started to crumble down.

“People started wearing sneakers to work or on a first date, and it wouldn’t be seen as a negative. It would be seen as, ‘Wow … you’re expressing yourself,’” Jeff says.

Store manager Jayden is a big fan of electronic music — the former DJ says it led him to streetwear and sneaker culture.

“I was a really big fan of Skrillex,” he says. “He often wore a lot of early Nike shoes, and that really influenced me into that type of stuff before I was really into sneakers.”

• “A lot of these artists, you see they are on stage, they want to make sure they look the best on stage. So their audience knows who they are and how they present themselves.”

Now, catalysed by the power of social media, celebrities, athletes and their shoes are more visible than ever, and it’s not only transformed the sneaker industry, but turned singers and rappers like Travis Scott and Kanye West into shoe designers — collaborations that can cost buyers thousands of dollars.

But a sneaker is still little more than a combination of coloured leather, fabric and rubber sewn together for as little as $10 — so where in the process does the mark-up begin, or end?

Chase Shiel has been making high-end, customised “one-off” pairs of sneakers in Melbourne for over 14 years, with clients that include Kevin Hart and Glenfiddich whisky.

While big corporations like Nike and Adidas mass manufacture shoes in the hundreds of thousands — “for roughly $10 to $20” a pair — Chase still works on each pair by hand.

He was able to walk us through the basic process of putting together a high-end sneaker, which he says takes him 20 to 40 hours work on average.

Putting together a high-end sneaker

Following a design request, which ranges from giving Chase free rein to specifying a theme or style, the process starts with finding the right “shoe last” — the plastic mould the shoe design is built around.

The next step is to design and create patterns around the last, tracing and cutting out the material according to the desired pattern …

… and then stitching all the pieces together to form the upper (the part of the shoe above the sole that covers the foot) while using shoe pliers to pull the leather tight to hold its shape.

Special shoe adhesive is then applied to keep the leather in place and ready for the sole to be attached, after which the shoes are placed into a “sole press” that sucks the air out of them and holds them together.

• “After it’s been pressed, I generally leave the shoe last in for 12 hours to make sure the bond has formed. Then you take the last out, and we’re ready to lace them up,” Chase says.

• “It’s just kind of like putting a puzzle together, really.”

Currently, most of the world’s sneakers are manufactured in Asia, where labour and manufacturing costs are cheaper than in Europe and America, as brands aim to economise costs as much as possible.

“The Asia Pacific has always been the place where shoes get made and it’s always been an export business,” Jeff Staple says.

“If you have a $25 shoe [made], it is sold to Nike for $50. Nike sells it to the store for $100. The store sells it to the customer for $200,” Jeff says.

“That’s kind of the loose economics around sneakers.”

According to Jeff, the only thing that separates a $40 shoe from a $100,000 “grail item” at a museum, is “branding and the storytelling”.

With a grey pigeon on it

• “People think that brands like Nike are not even like sneaker companies anymore. They’re marketing companies,” Jeff says.

Jeff has firsthand experience of this — in 2003, Nike approached him to make a Nike SB Dunk Low shoe dedicated to New York City. After some thought around the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, Jeff proposed a version with a grey pigeon on it — in his eyes, it symbolised the city’s urban street culture, as well as being pests.

• “Nike did not understand what a pigeon had to do with New York City,” he said.

But young New Yorkers got it right away — on February 22, 2005, the Pigeon Dunk was released. Then this happened …

Riots broke out on release day, and police were called as people brought weapons to the release of the same old SB Dunk Lows that were available the day before, except now they had Jeff’s pigeon story attached to them.

Only 150 pairs were made. Today a used pair would cost between $45,000 and $75,000. A mint-condition pair recently sold through Sotheby’s auction house for $150,000.

• “What we have an expertise on, on my side, being the artist or the creative, is being able to talk to a very specific audience that sometimes big brands have trouble speaking authentically to,” he said.

• “I’m kind of like the translator for that subculture.”

Apart from designing and storytelling, celebrity ambassadorship contributes significantly to the mark-ups.

“If you’re buying a pair of LeBron James sneakers, one of the biggest reasons why that shoe costs $200 is not the manufacturing or technology of the shoe — it’s because of how much they have to pay LeBron James as a sponsor,” Jeff Staple says.

Resale value

As well as what is known as the “reselling” market, similar to a variety of aforementioned stories, many sneakerheads will stock up on limited releases of shoes in anticipation of them appreciating in value — hence the massive line-ups outside stores — so that they can wear them, or make a decent profit when they resell them.

According to a number of sneakerheads and bloggers, what resellers are peddling, and consumers are hoping to acquire, or buy, is a form of “instant credibility” — by getting their hands early on a once-in-a-lifetime cultural moment that rich people in the future are going to want to have.

For example, these Nike Air Yeezy Sample shoes worn by Kanye West at the 2008 Grammy Awards, sold for over $2.7 million at Sotheby’s in 2021.

All these mechanisms come together, to force the price of what used to be a throwaway pair of sports equipment, or a couple of days’ hard labour, into a commodity that’s contributed to an exploding billion-dollar industry.

Amid breakouts of violence and stabbings at shoe release events, and pre-teens dreaming of blowing their life savings on shoes marked up 10,000 times, one wonders if the fad has peaked, or how much crazier it can get.

• “There’s no turning back now. We’re never going to be barefoot, right?” Jeff Staple says.

• “And we’re never going to go back to the days where we’re wearing leather-bound loafers with a wood bottom, like dress shoes, out every day.”

So in terms of what to expect for the future of the industry …

3D printing

Some companies have begun to explore 3D printing by having parts of their sneakers made with this new technology, giving us a glimpse of what the future might look like …

“Imagine in the future, you could walk into a store, measure your foot, and in a few minutes, they print the shoe directly just for you — there’s no inventory and it’s fit perfectly for you,” Jeff says.

NFT

Others are capitalising on the NFT market by creating “virtual” sneakers that can’t be worn, but are bought and traded as digital commodities …

In 2021, Nike acquired RTFKT, a company that creates digital collectibles/NFTs related to gaming and culture. Last year, a digital sneaker sold for over $200,000, and Nike recently reportedly hit nearly $300 million in NFT sales and royalties.

AI

Others, like Michael Fan, have also pointed to the potential AI has for inspiring future designers through its massive data pool.

“For example, we could type, ‘Design me a sneaker that suits the public aesthetic look,’ and it could canvas a massive data field to come up with unique designs,” Michael says.

These technologies could signal the early stages of how the sneaker culture will continue to move forward, as they also tackle a lot of the sustainability and manufacturing costs of sneaker production.

Asian brands

At the same time, Asian sports brands — like Anta — are on the rise, and slowly realising they not only have the manufacturing abilities, but they’ve got massive markets, and might not necessarily need Western brands and endorsements.

In 2022, Anta’s earnings in China exceeded $11.2 billion, surpassing Nike’s $10.75 billion to become the largest sports brand in China.

And many sneakerheads and experts believe this is a trend that may potentially go global in the years to come, in the same way that Asian corporations overtook their Western electronics and vehicle-manufacturing competitors — with Samsung, Sony, Hyundai and Toyota — in the 20th century.

So, although for now Western brands are predominantly being manufactured in Asia for exportation, many see that balance shifting in the years to come.

• “Thirty years ago, people living in China, Vietnam and Korea were not the customers, they were just the manufacturers shipping shoes to Europe, Japan and America,” Jeff Staple says.

• “As the disposable income and the working middle class of those Asian countries began to grow, they began buying shoes [as a luxury item].”

The economic growth and greater domestic demand has demonstrated to some Asian brands that they may not need the USA or Germany to build or market their own brands.

“Many years ago, any mention of a Chinese sports brand would have people think they’re plagiarised, or that China doesn’t have good quality products or technologies,” Michael says.

“But now they have absolutely transformed.

“A lot of NBA stars who signed deals with Chinese brands [like Kylie Irving and Jimmy Butler] aren’t just looking at how much money they can get but, more importantly, whether the shoes they can get are reliable to play on the court.”

“Those things will be huge boosts to their influence and visibility,” Michael says, although he believes there is still a bit of a journey to go to definitively break into Western markets.

Whatever shape the future takes — some sneakerheads like Michael are “repulsed” by “virtual sneakers”, maintaining the cultural value lies in the limited accessibility to a physical artefact — most agree that the sneaker market is here to stay and will continue to shapeshift and grow.

• “Now that every CEO, accountant, lawyer and athlete in the world is wearing sneakers, you couldn’t pay them enough to wear uncomfortable loafers,” Jeff Staple says. “We might wear them occasionally for like a wedding or special occasion.

• “But by and large, we’re staying with the sneakers.”