It’s hard to place the origins of sneaker culture as we know it today. You could say it started with the original Air Jordan or Nike’s Air Max line. You could argue it really got going via the NikeTalk forums and the resale industry and SNKRS, with social media and cell phones acting as the great equalizer in a retail world once built on knowing the right person who could get you the right pair of shoes at the right time. Still, if you want the closest parallel to the sort of creative energy, hype, and ethos that the current sneaker world exists in, it’s the Dunk Era.
Dunks first exploded in the ’80s as a basketball shoe, with high- and low-top variations fusing function and aesthetic like few other sneakers of the era. What started as a shoe made for the court eventually planted the seeds of the culture, largely thanks to the ’90s-era CO.JP line. Through this project, Nike produced a series of exclusive colorways (with some choice Dunks among them) for Japanese retailers that soon became the stuff of sneaker legend, creating a sense of elusiveness to new colorways and fueling a community of Western fans eager to find a way to track down a pair from the other side of the planet.
Along the way, the silhouette took on immense popularity in an unexpected place: skate culture. The flat, traction-friendly sole and lightweight nylon tongue (a new addition to the silhouette in the nineties) made it as perfect for riding a board as it was for the court—not to mention the shoe had become incredibly accessible as Jordans and signature basketball sneakers took over the market. It was easy to walk into a sneaker store and find Dunks on a discount rack, meaning nobody had to feel any type of way about thrashing their pair on a sesh.
When sneaker legend Sandy Bodecker took over the burgeoning Nike SB line in 2001 (the official brand launch came in 2002), he saw incorporating the Dunk into the line as an obvious move. So with some choice modifications (namely a fat padded nylon tongue) the SB Dunk hit the scene, changing the course of sneaker history. Throughout the aughts, Nike SB Dunks became the centerpiece of sneaker culture, thanks to an unrivaled run of visionary designers, skaters, collaborators, and a tendency to embrace chaos. Shoes drew inspiration from cult cinema, cities, music, and more. In an era in which so many of these worlds were colliding with each other and that of streetwear, SB Dunks became everything. For a specific generation of sneakerheads, this era is ground zero for their obsession with shoes.
After the aughts the Dunk fell off, going largely dormant throughout the 2010s as Yeezys, FlyKnits, and UltraBoosts moved to the center of the culture. But you can’t keep a good shoe down. Dunks—both the classic and SB iterations—made a comeback in a big way around 2019, with retros of the original ‘Be True’ line and a series of hot collaborators in the SB division recapturing the vivacious spirit of decades past. With more hits certainly on the way in the years to come, it’s safe to say the Dunk will never die.
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