Sneaker Freaker

Turns out there were thousands of people doing the same thing, all over the UK, all over the world. Well outside the US during the early Eighties, Hip-Hop was still a relatively exotic musical enigma and the fashions that went with it were even more ambiguous. ‘In the UK back then we had no internet, no blogs or torrents, no behind the scenes studio webcasts and certainly no Youth TV. There was barely any radio coverage, we had no cable tv “What rapper could live in a house like this?” type programming. We scraped details of records, groups, performances, even what a rapper looked like from any source available’ MD informs Sneaker Freaker. Back then the only way to find out about these artists and what they wore, was to keep check on every single American lifestyle and music magazine on the news-stands and maybe even the odd English one.

Murder explains the aspirational effect seeing these references to this newly discovered fashion accessory. Remember that ‘gym shoes’ were practical back in the early Eighties, something we wore because our Mums bought them for us to wear on sports-day at school! We’d discover information about some random Rap track by reading tiny reviews in the back of Blues & Soul, peeping a pic of a Rapper in a studio and more importantly at that stage, we’d discover information about the shoes they wore by reading hard to find mags like Thrasher, Transworld or even skate videos like ‘Bones Brigade’. These evidently became the sources of information for any of these shoes or musicians. ‘Thrasher was my first encounter with Michael Jordan, well his shoes at least. We’d seen plenty of skaters do their ramp or bowl thing in Vans Check Slips and multi-colored Converse All-Star Hi’s, the covers of those publications had been adorned with canvas shoes for as long as I can remember’.

The year was 1985, seeing Steve Cabellero catch boneless air on the cover of an issue of Thrasher magazine wearing the Jordan 1s was the tipping point for our eagle-eyed whippersnapper, a definitive moment in the progression and advancement of what we aspired to. ‘This was the moment when ‘Vert skating’ was becoming more street orientated’ he confesses. ‘These shoes were leather for a start, there had been nothing anywhere near that bold or striking before’.