Why One Sneakerhead Cut Back to a Solitary Pair of Adidas
When you’re “a sneaker guy” there are a certain set of questions you will inevitably be asked over and over again. How many pairs do you own? Can you get me a pair of *fill in impossible to get sneaker name here*? What are your top five favorite sneakers? If you could only wear one pair of sneakers for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Over time, you come up with ready answers to all of these. In order: “Between 500 and 1,000,” “No,” and “I have no idea.” The last one, though, is the toughest. Over the years it’s changed, from the Air Jordan III to the Air Jordan 1 to the Stan Smith. But if you asked me right now, I’d probably say the adidas Campus.
Because, these days, that answer seems more correct than all the rest. The Air Jordan III was a young man’s answer, more about the impact of its design and style than its long-term wearability. The Stan Smith is too white (not you Stan, the shoe), and the Air Jordan 1 is a bit too attention-grabbing to pair with anything outside of the basics. (I guess you could wear an all-black pair, but...why?) The Campus on the other hand, is the Goldilocks principle in sneaker form: for me, for now, it’s just right.
That’s true for plenty of reasons—some obvious, some leaning toward the metaphysical. Sure, the Campus is right in that wearability sweet spot—not as slim as the Gazelle, not as chunky as the Superstar—and has been produced in any number of colors and materials over the years. It even has impeccable on-court pedigree, as its Greenstar predecessor was worn by Bill Russell and his ‘69 Celtics teammates. Later, it enjoyed a revival on the feet of the Beastie Boys, who did for the Campus what Run DMC did for the Superstar.
About that: want to feel old? It’s been 27 years since two-thirds of the Beasties wore Campuses on the cover of 1992’s Check Your Head. At that time it had only been 23 years since Russell and the Celtics wore Greenstars en route to toppling Wilt Chamberlain and his Los Angeles Lakers, their 11th title in 13 seasons. Two generations of nostalgia are baked into the shoe—and when I pull a pair on, I feel some of that. Or, even stranger, a sort of nostalgia for nostalgia itself.
Think about sneakers in 1992. The timeline was still straight: retro editions didn’t exist. If you wanted an older model, you had to dig. Deadstock literally meant dead stock: obsolete shoes that were all but unsellable gathering dust in some sporting goods store back room or basement. Two years later, when Nike re-issued the first three Air Jordans, nobody cared. Why would anyone want old sneakers? Most of them wound up on clearance tables, marked down to $25 or less.
So when the Beastie Boys wore sneakers like the adidas Campus and the Puma Suede/Clyde in the early ‘90s, it actually meant something. These weren’t shoes sent by a publicist, or a collaboration worked up between the brand and the group. If you wanted those specific shoes, you literally had to get your hands dirty—or at least someone did. By the mid ‘90s, the brands caught up. That first Jordan retro release didn’t make noise, but as simpler sneakers came back into style, the classics got a second wind.
I got my professional start in the sneaker world right when all of this was happening. What was once linear became a criss-crossing series of lines that saw the newest models jostling for shelf space (and consumer dollars) with proven hits from the past, as well as little-remembered models revived for inscrutable reasons. A trip to the local sneaker spot became a little like listening to Paul’s Boutique: something new deeply cut through with references from the past. Instead of a simple hierarchy, where you lusted after whatever the most expensive new models were (there was no need to refer to an Air Jordan by number when it was simply theAir Jordan), now shelves were dense with sneakers from every era.
The rise of sneaker boutiques and collaborations stirred things even more. More releases, more references, more mixing of old and new. To stay on the crest of the sneaker wave you had to either have bottomless pockets and a long list of worldwide connects—or actually be part of the industry. I was in the latter group: I went from wishing I could have the newest stuff to stopping wearing pairs when they released at retail. One of my fondest sneaker memories from that era was walking into The Athlete’s Foot on the Upper East Side wearing royal Nike Foamposite Ones a full six months before they came out. No one even knew what they were.
Over the years, though, riding the wave got tiring. If this sounds like sour grapes, maybe it is. But staying current is a full-time job. If I was going to NBA All-Star, I’d pack a whole separate bag with shoes, aware of the fact that a) I’d be seeing reps from every brand and wanted to be respectful, and b) there was no way I’d be seen on consecutive days wearing the same shoes. And this was before Instagram! Sometimes I was even more respectful than I even needed to be—back in 2002 in DC, a representative from a brand I won’t name saw me wearing a pair of his brand’s basketball shoes that he himself had sent me and looked up at me incredulously: “You actually wore those?”
Sometimes I look at sneakers the way Mickey Mouse looked at the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. We only had so much, so we wished for more. And at first more was good, but then more became even more, and more, and more, and finally too much, and by then there was no way to stop it. I look at the way things are now—blogs posting “The 25 Best Sneakers Releasing This Weekend and How to Buy Them”—and wonder whether there’s even a sorcerer out there who can save us from ourselves.
I can’t save you. I don’t even know whether I can save myself: I still get caught up in new releases, still log onto the SNKRS app to get a series of error messages before tossing my phone aside. But in the meantime, I’ve been trying to do something different: is take one of the thousands of “you can wear these every day!” sneakers and doing exactly that.
And for now, that’s the adidas Campus. But that doesn’t mean I’m all the way out on sneaker nonsense. There are the basic models, yes—the navy and maroon pairs I got earlier this year—but there are also the Stock X IPO joints that just hit—or, if you wanna dig really deep, the Foot Patrol B-Side joints that I named sneaker of the year back in 2011. I recently dug mine out of storage and, yeah, I still agree with 2011 me.
But no matter the version I’m wearing, I feel like I’m tapping into something a little deeper. I keep going back to the Beastie Boys and 1992 and Check Your Head, the jacket alone which is a cross-genre time capsule of legendary shit—Glen E. Friedman photo, Eric Haze handstyle, and of course the Beasties themselves. But all of that was secondary stuff, because what really mattered was inside—what you heard when the needle dropped into the groove. The Beastie Boys didn’t do all this shit to get noticed, they did it because it they thought it was dope. If other people agreed, that was a bonus. They didn’t wear Campuses because they were cool—they made the Campus cool by wearing them.
In an era where people increasingly want their sneakers to speak for them, I find myself wondering what exactly it is that we’re trying to say. So while my whole Campus thing might seem like simply choosing one sneaker over many, I’m thinking of it more as trying to recalibrate the balance of sneakers in my life. Because if I meet you for the first time and the first thing you do is check my feet, you’re looking in the wrong direction.
Originally Appeared on GQ
