Sneakers

I had never had a burning urge as a younger person to own any particular brand of sneakers. While many of my peers were slaving over whatever the latest Jordan had just been released, I was generally content wearing basic Vans or whatever sneakers “looked good” when I walked into the shoe shop to get a new pair. I wasn’t fussy.

When I started working with Aglet in April 2020 my colleagues were largely Sneakerheads. Which isn’t so surprising, Aglet was a game which was entirely about sneakers (at that time).

All of them had stories about “their first sneaker”, the one that got them interested in sneakers for the first time. Their awakening. I didn’t have that. Until I saw the Nike SB Dunk Low ‘Travis Scott’. Well, what I actually saw was an image we had created to represent that shoe in the game. They look like this

I fell in love with them immediately. The muted blue/white/tan/white colorway. The different fabrics, including tartan and plaid. Everything about these sneakers “called out” to me in a way I had never heard before from a sneaker. I yearned for these.

The sneaker marketplace is an extremely lucrative one. Millions of sneakerheads operate in secondary sneaker marketplaces, and shoes are bought and sold by collectors. Which is great, because if you fall in love with a shoe, like I did with these Dunks, you can just go and look up the price to buy today from sellers across the globe. So I went and looked up the price. Here’s the listing for a pair of Size 11 on the StockX marketplace. At time of writing, the “buy now” price is AUD$3,351. Obviously I do not own a pair of these. Regardless, they were the shoes that inspired my interest in sneakers. And I now have very many pairs.