STASH INTERVIEW

I never actually heard the story of how you started working with Nike.
I met Mark Parker (President of Nike) in Japan with Hiroshi Fujiwara. Mark gives me his card and I read it and I’m like ‘President of what – Japan?’ I don’t know anything about the company at this time but I embarrassed myself bad. I say I had two friends in the Nike office back in the day when I worked with Triple 5 Soul. There was this woman Betsy who was mad hot and Mark says ‘That’s my sister!’ (laughs) But it opened up this great relationship and I got invited to work on a shoe. Then you realise that company is so big, staff don’t talk to each other, and one department ask me to do something, but they don’t realise I’m doing something else as well. I don’t know how it worked. I was in at a very early stage of the whole collaboration thing. We made a lot of really amazing stuff together.

Including the Nozzles, which won the ‘Greatest Air Force 1 of all time’ at the NYC party.
Is that real? I don’t know. They gave it and took it away in my opinion. In a weird way they didn’t do anything outside of the party. They didn’t tell me they were having a vote on it. I didn’t know, I walked in there blind.

That was an awesome party.
It was an amazing party. I live in New York and you probably remember this, they even booked me a hotel room and I said ‘But I live in Brooklyn!’ I was such an asshole, I was like ‘Can you give me the $200 for the room?’ I have to say nobody even knew that my shoe won the competition until much later, because they announced it when people were leaving. Then they never did any real press about it. They never did anything on their website, they never said anything. What they did do was this Air Force 1 site, where you could buy a poster of it.

1Thology I think it was called.
Right. They didn’t even ask me, so I bought a poster of the shoe with my name on it. I was like ‘Wow, how are you guys going to do that?’ The decision to do all that had nothing to do with the people I’m friends with. That company is just so big.

I remember now because we had subway tokens and they had the voting tally on big screens. We were told everyone would get a pair of the winning shoes, which I thought was pretty cool.
Right. Did you get your shoes?

I’m very happy to say I did... but it took some time.
You definitely did. Here’s who I am. I told Nike I want to sign every box.