A couple of years ago, mid-pandemic, I had an interview with a popular up-and-coming sneaker authentication company. I made it through rounds 1 and 2 with your typical corporate folk, but when they told me I was to meet with their resident sneaker expert I figured I had it in the bag. After all, I had been obsessed with sneakers for the past 30 years, and had been authenticating 10,000+ pairs a year for the past 5. But when I clicked on the ‘join zoom meeting’ link on my computer and saw the dude that was interviewing me, my brain kinda broke.
He took one look at me and made his mind up before a word even came out my mouth. He looked to be about 20 years younger than me, dressed like all the dudes you see at the sneakercon events and carried a vocabulary that matched those you see in sneakercon tiktoks. Based on his general demeanor, his speed of dictation, and how fast he registered my answers between long pauses and his one word responses - I could pretty much smell the vape smoke coming through the screen.
He asked me a few questions - with which I stacked layer upon layer of reference and sneaker knowledge, then hit me with a brief authentication test. It was a painful conversation because I felt the dude was high as hell and I was firing on all cylinders. Not a good match.
The whole ‘conversation’ and ‘test’ lasted about 15 minutes. Significantly less time than I spent with HR and the CTO of the company, and that was that. I was cooked.
It was the first time I ever felt old in sneakers. Not just ‘old’ like that ‘cool old guy’ - which I often felt when I was a middle/high school teacher a few years prior. But this was a new feeling. This was over-the-hill old. What I thought was an undeniable strength, someone on the other end decided it was very deniable.
I never got a response from that dude or that company. And I know it comes down to how that dude perceived me.
On top of that - to this day - I know I could have helped that company enter into markets that dude couldn’t even touch. But who am I going to sing those praises to now?
When I first started collecting sneakers as a teenager, I didn’t know of anyone that was ‘older’ that was really doing this. It wasn’t really documented and the internet didn’t really exist and all you really knew was what you saw through various piecemeal media - sometimes it was music videos or record covers or magazines or movies. It was word of mouth. Sneakers felt new and it felt fresh and it felt like, despite my geographical limitations, I was on the edge of something that had yet to be named. Similar to rap music. My naiveté reminds me of that saying: ‘every generation thinks they invented sex, and every generation is wrong.’
If you’re old - like me - you understand that young people shape their identity by pushing back of the norms of previous generations. So, yeah, in a way, caring about my footwear was a way of pushing back against the generations before me that didn’t. This was my desire to create something new and distinct (as I mentally prepare myself for the time when my kids start pushing back against MY love for sneakers by wearing ‘Hey Dudes’ and ‘Crocs).
If I had to call it, I would have thought ‘the end’ of sneakers as we now know it would have happened around 2015. Even back then, the market felt oversaturated. But ten years later and sneakers are still here. They’re still shaping identities and they’re still setting cultural norms. But what’s crazy is that even the shoes never changed, their meaning did.
So what happens when young people and old people use the same base objects for norms as a basis for identity? Exactly what happened to me in that interview.
I should have seen this coming, though, as I had a similar interview with Greg Schwartz of StockX a few years prior. I remember I mentioned something like ‘when are you going to bulk up your catalog so I can buy all of the shoes I’ve always been looking for’ and he kinda scoffed: ‘we’re not looking to catalog everything, only popular shoes.’ Wut?
Initially the hard part was realizing I wasn’t right for the job. It wasn’t because I didn’t know enough. It was because I knew too much.
And I’ve come to accept that as just a part of life. I no longer need anyone to validate my sneaker knowledge anymore. The experience is mine, whether it’s recognized or not. I don’t need permission to be a Savant, and a fancy job title wouldn’t have changed that anyway. Sneakers never stopped mattering to me. They just stopped needing to explain me.
The long way around.