Guest Blogger Gary Warnett is an OG

I love sneakers. I’m preoccupied with the fucking things, but I hate the term “sneakerhead” — to me it reeks of stone-faced characters playing a number game. Who the fuck cares about the trillions of variations on the same theme? I don’t just hate “sneakerhead” because we call sneakers trainers in the UK. I hate it because everyone I’ve ever met calling themselves that word is –without exception — dull. It conjures up images of t-shirts with sneakers on in bright colours, people broadcasting themselves babbling about a shoe without a shred of insight or cultural context and the same shoes on everyone’s feet.
Wasn’t sporting the same shoe a never forgive action (word to Min One) just a few years ago? Maybe I’m getting old. Sneaker lover? That works for me, but I prefer the term, sneaker connoisseur. I like to let the connoisseurs educate me. What defines a sneaker connoisseur? The folk who bug out over oddball things…the ones with the eye for strange details…the ones who leave the beaten track of tired bullshit. Lest we forget, this whole miserable subculture was built on the re-appropriation of specific sports-orientated at street level. All I see is product on feet that was aimed at trend from mood board to finished article. It’s not a strong look.
I don’t care how long you’ve been in “the game” or how many pair you’ve got. I’ve got more respect for someone with a single pair of the Air Muscle Max (pause) than a whole teetering wall of beige boxes of hyped-up nothingness.
And America — as someone who looked up to your nation to lead me on the sneaker front, from from day one, you’re letting me down. You aren’t leading from the front any more – even New York’s been assimilated into global rollouts.

I grew up seeing the flyest footwear in American films like Data in the tricked-out Sky Force for the duration of ‘The Goonies’ or album covers and music videos filled with gems — CL Smooth in the Forums? EPMD in Air Flight 89s? Fat Boys in Air Assaults? Audio Two in Air Pressures? Dr. Dre in Air Delta Force Hi? Anyway, that’s a whole other blog post.

I saw pictures of gully-looking New Yorkers in that esoteric “what the fuck?” luxury performance footwear — the New Balance 1500s ($160 back in 1989!), ASICS Gel Lytes, the buttery looking Ellesses…and while I’ve seen Queens dudes wearing the latest Air Max installments, and my good friend Nick Schonberger reports that Philly goons were rocking the Ashiko ACG boot, when I visit the States and see dudes wearing the same footwear I see in Europe, I get depressed.
From conversations with Ronnie and my fellow Twitter shoe weirdos, I know he understands the power of stranger, uncommercial sneakers. While the sneaker collector (I consider myself a hoarder rather than collector) boom rolls in dips and troughs, no matter how many times a limited edition shoe causes enough of a queue ruckus to make the front pages or how many episodes of a shitty NYC-based HBO show touch on the subject of “sneakerheads,” the connoisseurs are still an endangered species, grossly outnumbered by cornball individuals 1000:1 on some ‘Day of the Dead’ zombie to human ratio shit.
The real problem is retail. Especially physical retail. What happened to the great stores? Now everything’s homogenized. Sure, there’s the occasional Japanese or American exclusive, but the shelves are laden with the same shit everywhere I go. They might be a few weeks apart during some release confusion, but how can we return from faraway journeys with the pieces nobody else has got? Fuck a boutique.
When I first saw Alife’s Rivington Club, it blew my mind…they’ve been imitated too many times with the same dead-eyed copycat nonsense that’s ruined pretty much everything. In Berlin a few weeks back, I saw a sporting goods store with the old-school Nike logo and an adidas trefoil, hand-painted…it had me getting nostalgic. And nostalgia’s a dangerous thing.

Shouts to David Z (and I’m not just saying that because I’m on Ronnie’s site) for having some oddities on the shelves that I couldn’t get back home like the ill New Balance 993s, but it was the collection of images of celebrity ’90s hip-hop visitors by the door that really blew my mind. That kind of thing’s magical to me. Remember going into stores and being surprised by what was on the shelves, or buying stuff because it looked good, rather than being part of some lame theme pack? I liked it when stores were run by someone who was oblivious to the levels of footwear crack on their shelves — that’s how real legends are born.