Sneakers Aren’t Dead, You’re Just Getting Old

Guys in the ‘80s said sneaker culture was dead when Air Jordan took over the game and made it mainstream. People from the ‘90s got upset when sneaker culture went from shoes made for athletes like Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders, Andre Agassi, and Allen Iverson to a wave of lifestyle products with no sporting purpose. And those collecting Air Force 1s, early Nike SBs, and the first quickstrikes started to lose the feeling when you could buy their IYKYK sneakers in the middle of the mall.

All of this has happened before and will continue to happen again. Just because your era of sneaker collecting has started to slowly change doesn’t mean that footwear obsessing is dead all together. It means we’re moving on to the next chapter.

And hey, another reason that some of us stop buying every sneaker that we see is the reality of collecting, and hoarding, shoes starts to set in. Maybe you already have 300 pairs and don’t feel the need to continually add to the already cramped bedroom or spare room or storage container. Maybe you realized that you never got to wear everything that you purchased years ago, and maybe some of it has completely crumbled and become unwearable over time. Maybe your wife yells at you with every single new pair of shoes you bring into the house. All of these can happen. It won’t stop you from loving sneakers at the heart of it all. It truly is a hard thing to shake.

Even with all the frustrations with the way sneaker releases go—how hard it can be to get the one hyped shoe that everyone else wants, or that the quality didn’t live up to your expectations on a retro—the love for sneakers usually remains, just maybe in a different form. Maybe you stroll by a JD Sports and see a cool general release in the window, maybe you get excited about going for a walk in a park and seeing someone in a pair you never saw someone wear before or make look cool. Or maybe you go through your stacks of dusty boxes and find something that you forgot you owned. And then you wear them on a Saturday and restore the feeling. So, no, sneakers aren’t dead.

Just because you haven’t seen anything in the last three months that’s made you lose your mind, or the sneakers you hit on SNKRS are reselling for less than what you paid for them, doesn’t mean this thing is over. Us sneaker nerds will always be here, and we’ll always be on the hunt for something fresh.

But don’t let us tell it. We’ll defer to sneaker historian and New York icon Dallas Penn, a friend to Complex who passed last week. He was in his 50s and never lost his eye for footwear.

“It don’t stop,” Dallas would say. “It won’t stop.”