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AstoriaVIII's FRKN Blog

Mr West says, "Welcome to the Good Life"

We've been a fan of Murakami's work for a long time (and don't mind Mr West! Mr West! either) and have been contemplating a tribute shoe for a number of months.
The release of Graduation seemed like just as good a time as any to do this so here it is. Takashi Murakami inspired Dunk.





*Just the left shoe for now...didn't have time to finish the rest in time for Graduation's release date but will post more images once the shoes are complete.

**It took a while (Big Astoria tried to end himself :p and DLV had to contend with the usual: uni and other orders) but the right shoe is finally finished. We changed it up as we are usually wont to do. Curious to see what people think of that decision. Here are the images.

Ink

Ink / Cartoon / Estavan Oriol inspired Air Force One.

Astoria in Wonderland

Astoria in Wonderland

Last December we completed the following shoe titled “Astoria in Wonderland�. It’s one of the rare sneakers which we’ve been able to create for ourselves over the last 2 years and we would have posted the images sooner but in defining procrastination to the extreme, we only edited the images today…
The majority of the design was created so that it is viewable only in the right light.
Otherwise, aside from the heel area, the shoe will appear to be simply BLACK.









In late March/early April we showed the sneaker to the Sydney based retail store Incu and discussed the possibility of doing a windows display (besides the fact that Incu is a store we relate to, there was the added incentive for us that Incu were in a prime position, a few doors down from SP1. Which for those of you who have been to Sydney will agree is a high traffic area).

Astoria VIII painted both Incu’s The Galeries Victoria & Paddington stores with the themes "Astoria in Wonderland" and "sinister / allure" respectively. We also customised a small number of Umbro by Kim Jones sneakers to tie in with each store's theme.
An original canvas poster was also painted by DLV for each store.

Below are just a few of the MANY images we took. You can see the full collection here:
http://www.astoriaviii.com/A-VIIIxINCU.shtml

If you're in Sydney, be sure to stop by Incu and check out our work.

INCU CITY

Shop RG 23 Galeries Victoria
500 George Street
Sydney NSW 2000 AUSTRALIA
Phone: +612 9266 0244


INCU PADDINGTON
256 Oxford Street
Paddington NSW 2021 AUSTRALIA
Phone: +612 9331 6070

ASTORIA VIII x INCU

AIR FORCE ONE + BE@RBRICK X CITY OF ANGELS

Updated "City of Angels" Air Force One with a matching Be@rbrick.
We've been wanting to do a matching Be@rbrick for a while now and whilst we did this one up pretty quick we'll probably devote a little more time to next one.

Bobbito

We actually posted a preview pic of this shoe a while ago but the girl who ordered the shoe originally as a gift for a friend of hers recently informed us that her friend really liked the shoe. In fact, he liked it so much he put it in BOUNCE Magazine. And as you’ve probably figured out from the title of this topic, the friend in question is the man himself, Bobbito Garcia.

So in light of these facts, I figured the least I could do is post a pic of the whole shoe and say thanks to Bobbito for the approval…and of course to Ankia for asking us to do the shoe in the first place.

(as a side note, when we were told to paint Bobbito Garcia, DJ Cucumber Slice, Kool Bob Love etc. on the shoe we thought the person who was getting them must have been mentally ill or harboured an all too obsessive affection for Bobbito…..glad to know the shoes will actually belong to the person who owns those nicknames)

Air Jordan V

Just a basic, simple iD.

Urban Asylum

Here are the aformentioned adidas Stan Smith IIs which we were given to customise with a "streetball" theme.

Keeping with our black & white theme which we seem to be favouring recently, we painted a (gritty) cityscape and did the old school "shirts vs no shirts" on the toe box.

It was a fairly boring shoe to customise as it's essentially one flat panel and given the shoe again, we'd probably do it differently but as people say, experience is like a comb for when you're bald.

?*?*?

The design concept we were given for this pair of Air Force Ones was fairly unusual in that it’s a combination of our NY & City of Angels Air Force Ones with CB34 and Jam Master Jay thrown in as well. So unlike our previous work, there really isn’t much cohesion in terms of the concept but at the end of the day, we really like how they turned out. The Sir Charles portrait on the heel is our favourite part of the shoe by far…

Melancholy Rapture

The Nike Air Force One shown below was given to us to come up with any design we could think of with the mandate that we implement a portrait (of the Gentleman's Wife) somewhere on the shoe.

We took some images of the shoe prior to doing the portrait:



And some after...

The Modern Age

We're slowly but gradually working our way through our backlog of jobs but thought that we'd post some shoes on here for those that are interested seeing as how this is supposed to be about custom sneakers.

After a recent request we've lifted our self imposed ban on camo mainly because I think enough people have seen our work to know that we're not all about camo and that's not the only thing we can do.

It's not the type of camo (basic) we would have chosen for ourself for our first foray but it's pretty hard to go wrong with camo and I think these turned out pretty nice.




Also, on a more interesting note, we were asked to come up with a Hawaiian themed shoe and for a while we couldn't get past the imagery of hula skirts, coconuts and palm trees which was initially suggested...
What we did come up with is below. And we quite like it so we just may expand on it in the future if we get the chance.