String Theory auction closes this Friday at Sotheby’s London, offering a selection of rare collectible sneakers, ranging from estimates around 2000 pounds to other lots starting at a base auction price of 100,000 pounds to acquire a complete series of Nike x Luis Vuitton ‘Air Force 1’.
The ever-growing interest in this type of collecting is not a recent phenomenon: in July 2020, Sotheby’s offered 100 pairs of old sneakers to its audience for a total amount of 1.29 million dollars. Among the various lots was a Nike model from 1972, a year after the brand’s foundation, which had more than doubled the previous record for a pair of sneakers. The Canadian investor Miles Nadal acquired the pair of shoes with the intention of displaying them in his private museum in Toronto.
The sneaker aspiring to be in a museum has nothing to do with the now outdated processes of displacement or practices like the readymade. Its future presence in museum containers aspires instead to become a symbolic object that sees its transcendence from a sports tool to a fashion aspirational element, to an artwork veiled in almost votive respect. The sacred aspect is evident in some of the most striking cases of collecting objects imbued with the aura and body of the “saint,” and from this point of view, no one has been as central as Michael Jordan in nurturing this cult.
If Air Jordan has become a logo as famous as Nike’s swoosh itself, this success is not only attributed to Jordan’s spectacular performances but also to the creation of a line of shoes with unique characteristics and design. In 2020, the other major auction house, Christie’s, auctioned a pair of Air Jordan 1s, which reached the record price of 615,000 dollars.
The pair of shoes was a unique item as it was the model worn on August 25, 1985, when Jordan participated in an exhibition game in Trieste against the Italian teams Stefanel Trieste and Snaidero Caserta. From that show, the moment when the athlete rose to the basket with such force that the dunk shattered the backboard into pieces was memorable: the left shoe sold by Christie’s still contains a piece of glass embedded in the sole.
Certainly, in this case, the fetishistic element of memorabilia has its specific value. However, there is something entirely different in the attention and ‘scientificity’ in the collecting of sneakerheads compared to, for example, how other cult objects are preserved and exhibited: because while Marilyn’s famous dress borrowed by Kim Kardashian for the last Met Gala (and tailored to fit the celebrity’s shape) was sold for 4.8 million dollars, it is also true that the “museum” that houses it, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, is actually a family entertainment park chain that has nothing to do with the concept of an art museum as we still imagine it.
Hence, the increasing perception that objects we can wear and that accompany us in everyday life, even if produced in more or less limited editions, can aspire to be in museum containers and white-cube devices must be attributed to something else. Virgil Abloh, a designer, artist, and DJ, has undoubtedly been the figure who, more than any other, has recently legitimized the culture of sneakerheads in places previously destined for “high” cultural forms.
Before his death in November 2021, while serving as the creative director of Off-White and Louis Vuitton, Abloh firmly believed that sneakers were a new form of art. Born in 1980, he started collecting them as a child, amassing a collection of 2000 different pieces. When asked about the importance of sneakers, Abloh responded to Artnet: “This generation can value sneakers more than a Matisse because [Matisse] is unattainable.”
It is not a coincidence that sneakers played a fundamental role in Abloh’s exhibition Figures of Speech hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2019. A project that now appears as a manifesto and testament to his vision: in the exhibition, the works ranged from references to street culture to a perfect re-presentation of the aesthetics of austere American conceptual and minimal art from the late 1960s, in an arrangement created by OMA perfectly conceived to make viewers perceive the exhibited works not as the work of a designer occasionally hosted in a museum but as the interventions of a true post-conceptual author.
Among the works was also a deconstructed Air Jordan model created for Nike and then displayed as a sculpture. “I regard them as artworks,” Abloh stated. “They have a visual language of their own. I look at sneakers as art objects to cling to and always keep close.”
It is undoubtedly thanks to Abloh that the increasingly frequent auctions dedicated to this new market have taken a leap: $25.3 million was the stellar amount reached on February 9th in an auction at Sotheby’s New York. It was on that occasion that 200 specimens of the same model made of Nike x Louis Vuitton leather “Air Force 1” designed by Virgil Abloh, complete with a monogrammed case, piqued the appetites of collectors worldwide, targeting a “young” audience as more than a third of the bidders were estimated by the auction house to be under 40.
If sneakers are now an integral part of any brand’s vision, representing sometimes the majority of a brand’s revenues and creating a true expressive trend (consider the work done by designers like Rick Owens or Yohji Yamamoto), it is not uncommon to see limited editions of sneakers in collaboration with true visual artists. However, while artistic “customization” is a practice that only partially adds value to the model, in trying to understand perhaps more fundamentally the codes of this phenomenon, it is important to bear in mind how these objects are intimately linked to the revolution of codes that black culture has brought to the surface, conquering nearly the entire landscape of mainstream pop music and, as in Jordan’s case, sports.
In April 2021, the famous Nike Air Yeezy 1 Prototypes “Grammy Worn” by Kanye West was sold by Sotheby’s for the amount of 1.8 million dollars, surpassing the previous record of the 1985 Air Jordan 1 worn by the basketball champion. In this context, sneakers carry a very strong symbolic significance that better describes than many other objects the cultural and social changes, as well as the power dynamics among different ethnic groups in redefining the concept of art in our present time.
In 2000, on the occasion of a unique and in many ways brilliant exhibition titled Let’s Entertain: life’s guilty pleasure curated by Philippe Verge for the Walker Art Center, a brilliant volume was published that foresaw the times, republishing an interview on the sneaker phenomenon in 1997 featuring Gordon Thompson III, then the creative director of Nike, responding to questions from Elein Fleiss and Dike Blair. When asked if there was anyone who had collected all their shoes, Thompson replied: “There is a store in Tokyo that has all the old Nike products. I went there with the head of clothing design and the head of footwear design: we were on a kind of field trip. We laughed so much; it was like the Hall of Shame of Nike. Terrible products, and they were charging thousands of dollars for this stuff that I designed five years ago. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe someone would pay so much for this crap.’ But they do, and they continue to do so.”