The other day, I was reading this old Chuck Klosterman article where he talks at length about nostalgia and why it exists…and tries to get to the root cause of why we like to look back at ‘the good old days’. My whole sneaker journey can probably be traced to my own personal nostalgia for a handful of pairs and there’s really no shortage of memories I have attached to them. I could pretty easily tell you what shoes I was wearing when, mostly because I only had a few pairs of shoes when many of the formative moments in my life occured.
But so part of this Klosterman article, he argues that we tie nostalgia to certain things because of what we happened to be going through at a certain point in our lives. I look at certain shoes in the same way I look at certain music...it hit me at a time I was ready to be hit. And it stuck.
Part of this could also be the fact that we didn’t have 100 new ‘sneakers of the century of the week’ when I was a kid. @nickengvall can attest to the fact that this is a thing - my parents used to buy me one new pair of shoes per school year. For 9th grade it was the Converse Aerojam’s. For 10th grade it was the Grant Hill 2’s. For 11th grade it was a pair of Air Movin’ Uptempo. And 12th grade - I said to myself ‘I can’t live like this’ and started saving up my own money to buy my shoes. Sure, I had beater pairs from prior years or thrift stores, but could you imagine wearing the same pair of shoes day in and day out for a year? Does the fact that I was only wearing ~1 pair for a year when I experienced XYZ build upon the notion of nostalgia for certain pairs? Or is that just what I chose to focus on at the time?
The question - is the neverending release cycle of ‘important’ shoes going to translate to ‘nostalgia’ for today's (young) consumers? Are sneakerhead kids (who currently own 20+ pairs of shoes) in 20 years going to remember what they had on their feet when XYZ happened? Or it that just not going to be a part of the memory? Are those associative memories going to get lost in a sea of options?
#chuckklosterman #memories #nostalgia #nikeairpenny2 #highschool #thesneakersavantremembers #sneakerheads #sneakerhead