You meet somebody, the first thing you do,
Is look down at their ankles and you're like “Alright bet.”
I remember people by their shoes first more than their face.
You know.
No one really drives cars in New York City right it's like a real walking city.
If you lived outside of New York in the suburbs or if you lived in LA,
The way people communicate how they floss is by their cars.
In New York what kind of kicks you have on your feet,
Represents your style and your swag
When they say I design a sneaker you know,
Nike designs the sneaker in terms of like the actual thing.
My job is to really take that innovation and that product and elevate it,
Or remix it or change it up so that it's more applicable to my generation.
And my culture.
This style is called the Nike Dunk. It's one of the pillars of Nike.
It was an anniversary year for the Dunk. I believe it was the 35th anniversary
of this shoe. Being that it was an anniversary they called me up,
And they said would you be interested in working on a design that is dedicated,
To New York City that's the only brief that they gave.
We were working on this idea of a pigeon A pigeon is the unofficial mascot
of New York City
In order for a pigeon to survive in the city it has to be a hustler
It has to be a grinder it has to scrounge and scrape and fight for food,
And its place in the world.
Prior to social media and the Internet you know really being like a big thing.
The only way you could get shoes all around the world was get your ass on a,
plane, train, or automobile and go to that country and get them.
There's a footwear frenzy
going on in the city right now a special sneaker made just for New York,
Is in such high demand people are fighting to own a pair of these things.
I knew something was going down with the release actually four to five days prior.
I see that the block is completely shut down by the NYPD now. Like two paddy
wagons like blocking the street sirens going off and there's like this ruckus,
happening right.
Got one kid saying like “I've been waiting here for five days.”
You got one kid saying like, “He wasn't here.” But the one dude’s like, “I was here.
What are you gonna say?” Right!
So like the cops needed to intervene and that's when real havoc broke out.
People were getting tossed into the back of cop cars
Kids were piled up against the fence
like it was a soccer game I was actually fearful at times for you know the safety,
of the people here you know the staff myself I was just you know
It was scary sometimes
Finally we got it to a point where we could open the store for,
business and actually start selling the shoes
So this shoe right now is about eight to ten thousand depending on
condition U.S. dollars
If you waited five days in line for a shoe and now you,
got one of them and all of a sudden you hear that like they're making replicas,
of them that ruins the experience. So I wanted to keep that original experience,
precious while also opening it up to a new beginning right
One of the biggest things that changed between the release of this shoe and the release,
of this shoe is technology
Now in this day and age there's so many other ways to get shoes
There's apps,
there's bots,
there's resellers.
We wanted to make sure that the new generation of sneaker heads,
understood the history
We released this newspaper here
What people didn't know at the time was that the entire cover of the newspaper,
was an augmented reality trigger point.
That when you scanned the newspaper with your QR reader, an AR figure of the shoe
literally popped out of this image and when you clicked on it, it was your key
to be able to buy this shoe early
So it was a great mix of like old school and new school
You get a job out there right now flipping burgers or like doing pizza
delivery you make like 12, 13 dollars an hour.
You flip the right kick and you can make 5 grand you know what I mean and
all you had to do was wait in line for a few hours in front of a store you know.
But I will say that the old man in me is against the idea that people are
using this as a commodity item to just make some profit off of.
There's so much story and history and like substance that goes into the making
of these shoes.
Enjoy the storytelling that comes with these things because they're awesome.
And you know they make you look cool too