The “Panda” Nike Dunk Low, love it or hate it, is a shoe everyone has an opinion about. Need proof? When I posted my thoughts on the shoe, all heck broke loose. What did I say that was so controversial? I said that, over the past five years, the Panda Dunk has been the most influential sneaker and has probably gotten the most new people into sneakers.
The black-and-white Dunk lows have easily been one of the most popular Nike shoes since they first were released in 2021. They’ve been restocked a countless number of times since. But they’re also one of the most hated shoes. “Pandas” are a cultural signifier that someone is new into sneakers or just doesn’t care about them all that much. Or, at least, just its NPC version of a sneaker. Something plain and simple that’s void of character.
The Panda Dunk existed in a perfect vacuum that made it into a big shoe. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, there was a boom in sneaker culture. People had nothing to do, so they went online to look at and buy sneakers. Maybe they’d wear them; maybe they’d resell them. But it felt like every shoe that came out during lockdown had everyone entering a SNKRS raffle to win them.
It was the same time that we saw the Dunk take off again. The energy started a few years prior, with Nike SB releases like the Canary, Purple Lobster, and Black Pigeon Dunks, and was furthered by Virgil Abloh and his Off-White versions. Then the Chunky Dunky and Travis Scott Nke SBs came out in 2020, and the brand brought back some of the original Be True to Your School renditions of the sneaker, which first released in 1985.
Nike was putting up numbers with the Dunks. They were en vogue again after years of being exiled to the sneaker desert. And it was an easy gateway model for a younger generation whose introduction to shoes may have been a cooked pair of white Air Force 1s or a generic Jordan 1 that they saw on TikTok. Nike was making these paint-by-number, every-shade-of-Pantone Dunks by the boatload, with nearly a new one coming out every week. So why, with all these flavors, did the public choose to be boring?
Sometimes when people are presented with so many options, it can be overwhelming. Instead of picking something bold, fun, or exciting, they go with something simple that they can wear any day. I feel like that’s what happened with the Panda Dunks. Are the UNLV or Michigan Dunks better, at least in my opinion, than the Pandas? By a country mile. But I also understand why the casual consumer would want them.
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