I could give a sh*t less about the currect state of fashion.
What is that one particular cool thing.
I don’t think anybody can say that anymore.
Fashion is in
the coolest time ever
because of accessibility,
and that equally makes it
the worst time
beacuse
of all this never ending
chaos of information
to keep up with forever changing trends
to keep up with social media.
I could sit here and try to act like I know what’s going on with the industry
and the fashion world,
but I really truly think that nobody knows what’s happening right now.
My name is Chad Muska, and I’m a skateboarder and a creator.
I think if I had to explain to somebody, what it is I do,
it would be a different answer each day.
I wake up,
I think,
and I create.
Everyday.
What do you create?
I create….
I create.
From the beginning like, I was always like, as soon as I was able to like, have my name
on a board or on a shirt, or anything like, I’ve always wanted to be very involved with
that process.
And when they asked me if I wanted to have a shoe, I was so hyped, you know, and that’s
when I started to sketch concepts and gather some things I was inspired by.
So this was my first shoe that I had out on ES footwear.
Sometime around ’96 I would say.
It was just the Muska shoe.
I just started kind of coming up with concepts and sketching some ideas, and then got to work.
So there’s a stash pocket in the tongue.
I was inspired by like, roos, kangaroos.
I don’t know if you remember those.
They had the little stash on the side.
And I always thought that was cool as a kid, seeing those, I was like “ah, it got a little
pocket on there.”
And, amongst other uses for it, it became the birth of the stash pocket.
So from the success of the ES shoe, sponned circa basically,
And it was sort of just the evolution of kind of where I left off.
The idea was to, create the most technical skate shoe ever.
So we had like, airbags in the back and there was an airbag in the front even as well.
This was kind of new at the time, like, bonding the rubber to the toe.
This was a fun time in shoe design for me because not only did we start this company
from scratch, but the ability to create anything that I wanted to come up with at this time
was there.
And there was really not a lot of resistance.
This is the skytop one.
Now looking at this shoe it looks fairly simple.
Doesn’t look like anything special.
But at the time, in skateboarding kind of stirred up a lot of thing just based on the
height alone.
Skinny jeans had been hittin’, but the high top didn’t really hit with it.
And I just, kinda saw that as a cool look.
Not only looking at it as like, a shoe, but thinking, how does that shoe apply from a
head to toe look.
The first season it came out, it was like, not happening.
I heard stories of sales reps going into shops and not even taking it out.
I felt a lot of doubt from a lot of people on
And I had heard my other friend hit me up and was like, “holy sh*t, Kanye West just
came into supreme and bought some of those,
bought your kicks.”
And I was like “no, that’s crazy, like, no way.”
This photo circulated and I was like “Oh sh*t Jay-Z’s rocking them,” and then some
other video came up and then like,
from there it was just like, all of a sudden, it was just like, pretty much overnight,
just everywhere.
You know, Slash had them on, and then it was like, Heidi Klum had them on, the Olsen Twins,
and this and like, Just this random mix of people, you know and
not to mention all the rappers, then into the Justin Bieber’s, uh,
Lil’ Wayne, and I just ran right…
I just couldn’t believe it, I just, you know, it was like wow, it was just…
Insane.
There’s a lot that goes on to a company, you know, it’s not just, make a T shirt
and sell it.
They see the success, but they don’t see all those things that went into making that
success.
The years of work and the years of failure.
Never stop working at what you love to do, but also know that like, there will be a lot
of disappointment along the way in order to be successful and then once your successful,
that’s not where,
Your, your job stops, that’s where it begins.