SF Interview With Highs And Lows
Highs and Lows is holding it down from Perth, on the western most edge of Australia. They might be a million miles from civilization, but it hasn’t stopped them from becoming the go-to boutique in Australia. With a bevy of colabs under their belt and their own in-house label on fire, we caught up with HAL manager Scott Wiltshire to talk Reebok, Kubrick and colabs.
Tell us something we don’t know about Highs and Lows?
That we’ve been open since 2005, and that HAL is short for Highs and Lows and isn’t a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
How is the scene in Perth and can you explain how far away from everything you guys are?
To see how far Perth sneaker culture has come since the late-80s is amazing. I can still remember when you had to go interstate or overseas just to get a pair. We’re nearly 3000 kilometers away from the nearest capital city, so we tend to travel a lot. You have to or you go crazy. Luckily, being so isolated also spawns a creative side, our music scene has produced some great talent, and this tends to carry across most of the creative output here.
I wanted to ask about your colabs. How do you approach them? What’s the most important thing?
Making something that we’d all want to wear first and foremost. Secondly, we try to do things that people want to see from a special make up release, i.e. premium materials, unique colour blocking, and technical details. Sometimes a concept will spawn an idea and the rest just flows from there.
A few years back you did a GL6000. How important was that moment for the recognition of HAL?
It was huge for us. We knew it was our first chance to make our name known so we tried to keep it classic and timeless.
This year you worked on a Classic Leather. Did that experience alter your perception of the shoe?
Yes and no. We wanted to stay within the realms of what Reebok would do with the shoe, but colour block the shoe in a way we hadn’t seen before. Reebok did a great job sourcing the right materials to bring our design to life. Hats off to the team for that.
Do you enjoy being part of the Certified Network?
Absolutely. It’s a huge honour that we get the chance to rep our city and country. We’ve been given some great opportunities to collaborate on some iconic shoes.
I heard there’s also a HAL Pump Fury coming. True or false?
We’ve definitely got more projects in the works with Reebok, so stay tuned.
Any other Reebok models you’d like to work on?
I’m personally a huge fan of Reebok’s 1985 line up, the LX8500 is amazing. It’d be nice to see the 1988 World Road make a comeback.
And finally, what’s your favourite Reebok colab of all time?
I’m going to be really obvious and say our GL6000. After three years, I still love it. It set a benchmark for all our other projects.
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