Chris Kaman was an unusual NBA player. The one-time Los Angeles Clipper had a propensity for weird flexes—falling asleep during a game, posing with a dead cat before a Charlotte Bobcats game, fabricating a viral news story about Blake Griffin smacking Justin Bieber—but was also an All-Star, cracking the lineup in 2010. A true enigma, much like the new wacky-but-kinda-fire basketball clogs by streetwear startup Scary Kittles, dubbed “the Kaman” in his honor, which just dropped today.
“He came into the league as this seven-foot, goofy-looking white dude with long, blond hair who weirdly had an ambidextrous game that had this really unorthodox style to it,” says Evan More, co-founder of the LA-via-NYC brand. “It just felt like the perfect marriage, sort of like what we wanted to achieve with these shoes.”
Stefan Kohli
Featuring an orange leather upper with embossed black lines emulating the grooves on a basketball, the funky footwear was designed by Scary Kittles co-founder Jack Herzog, whose day job is senior designer at fast-rising Brooklyn label KidSuper. The slip-ons turned some heads when the brand teased them on X in February, and they’re bound to make even more noise on social media now that they’ve officially landed.
Herzog had the sketch for the clogs sitting in his back pocket for a minute. “I’ve been showing people the design for literally years,” says the 30-year-old. “Every time I always got a really solid reaction, even from non-basketball fans. It just kind of makes sense. It’s one of those ideas where I’m just like, ‘I can’t believe this doesn’t exist yet.’”
It took a lot of R&D to perfect the Kaman. The guys tried experimenting with Horween leather, the official material used for NBA basketballs, but it didn’t quite meet their aesthetic standards. They went with genuine leather instead, over a contoured cork footbed. But the Lebowski carpet of the whole thing is the green suede insole.“It kind of ties the whole design together,” says Herzog, adding he wanted it to resemble “playground-green basketball courts.”
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