For years, every time someone talked about the Jordan 1, my mind always shot back to something Bobbito Garcia wrote about it. I didn’t remember it word for word, but the general sentiment about the AJ1 was that it was corny. And I more or less subscribed to that idea for the first 35 years of my life. I decided to ask ChatGPT about the quote, and GPT came back with some quote about how, when the Air Jordan 1 dropped, it was like you could buy cool for $65. The only catch was that if you didn’t have game, the shoes couldn’t help you.
It sounded exactly like Bobbito. His voice, his rhythm, his particular mix of love and irritation for sneaker culture. The kind of thing you hear once and carry around for years because it feels true, even if you can’t remember where you heard it.
Then I asked GPT for the source.
And ChatGPT did that thing it does where it keeps talking confidently while basically admitting it has nothing to stand on. “Yea, you’re right to question it.” It couldn’t verify where the quote came from. It couldn’t point me to a page, an interview, a transcript, or anything of substance. It just kept insisting. Which was its own kind of lesson.
So I went digging for real. I searched old interviews. I looked for my copy of Bobbito’s book, Where’d You Get Those?, and when I couldn’t find my physical copy, I found a digital version online. I started reading, expecting to finally land on the quote that had been living in my head: Bobbito didn’t say the Air Jordan 1 was corny, nor did he say it was a shortcut to cool. The actual quote reads as follows:
The first Air Jordan, in any true connoisseur’s view, looked garbage. The only person who looked jazzy in them was Jordan himself, yet everyone had them and swore they were the shit. Air Jordans represented the antitheses of what sneaker culture in New York was all about. It was the first sneaker in New York history that gained popularity on the street that it didn’t deserve. It was the beginning of a homogenous style for youth and brand loyalty, two phenomena that could never have existed in the independent, free styling era of sneaker culture from 1970-87.
Damn.
Not only was the quote in my head severely dumbed down, the quote from GPT completely false, but the real one was layered.
Before the Jordan 1, the way sneaker culture gets described, especially in New York, is that it was less about buying a cool shoe, but was more about buying a random shoe and making cool for yourself. You started with general release shoes and…You chose the lace color or maybe flattened them with an iron. You cleaned them obsessively after each wear - likely with a toothbrush. You customized them with markers. You mostly figured out how to stand out in a city where everybody was trying to be unique, just like everyone else.
With the Jordan 1 - you didn’t have to do any of that. You simply had to buy it. And it arrived already famous. You just bought it and inherited the cool.
As a kid in the 90s, that was basically how it felt. The first people I knew who had Jordan 1s were the ones with money. I don’t even remember ever seeing a pair of Jordan 1’s on a kid until I was in my early 30’s. I vaguely remember a college friend rockin’ a pair. But after that, it was like…it was just the rich, corny kids. Kids who could skip the effort and barrel straight toward cool. Whether that was fair or not, that was my early impression of the shoe. That it was a try-hard sneaker for people who didn’t have to try.
Which makes it even stranger that, nearly thirty years later, I came around.
Not because I suddenly started caring about 1985. Not because I learned the origin story and got emotional about it. But moreso because the Jordan 1 kept popping up on my thrift runs and showing up in places I just didn’t expect to see it.
Rap videos. In skate videos. On punks. On metal dudes. On the kind of people who weren’t chasing Jordan’s aura at all.
If you’ve ever watched The Search for Animal Chin, you can spot Lance Mountain skating in mismatched pairs. When I was a kid, I noticed the mismatch but I didn’t understand what I was looking at - I just thought he was being a clown. Years later, I rewatched it and realized he was wearing Jordan 1s. Which immediately raised the question I probably should have asked sooner.
Why were Jordan 1’s so prevalent in early skateboard culture?
The story I heard, and it makes sense even if some of it has turned into legend, is that Nike overproduced early. Demand was weird. They tried to catch up, they made too many, and pairs ended up on sales racks. And after the sales racks failed, they started giving them away to anyone that would take ‘em: most skate crews were running on minimal budgets, so they ended up in shops and given out for free.
That version of the Jordan 1 - the skateboarders Air Jordan 1 - is the one that softened me on it.
I couldn’t give a damn about MJ’s rookie year. I wasn’t sold on MJ until the Infrared 6. And I damn sure couldn’t give a damn about how the AJ1 ‘saved’ Nike. I only cared that my favorite skaters co-signed it (and they only co-signed it because they got it for free).
As you might know, when Nike and Jordan Brand eventually began releasing the Jordan 1 under their SB (skateboard) line amongst a flood of other releases under every customer segment - I started finding them at thrift stores. Thrift store shoes made way for collaborations, customs, fakes and endless iterations on the swoosh. And somewhere along the way, the Jordan 1 became the default sneaker for people entering the culture. The baseline. The entry point.
Which should have proved Bobbito right. The uniform sneaker. The beginning of homogeneity.
Except it ended up doing the opposite. The shoe became so dominant that it actually became the opposite of what Bobbito was claiming.
Because when a shoe becomes that common, it stops functioning as a shortcut and starts functioning as a canvas. People repaint it. distress it. rebuild it. bootleg it. replace the swoosh with something stupid…I’m talking butterflies and penis swooshes. People made it personal in every way imaginable.
A shoe that once symbolized the loss of individuality became the one that everyone chose to personalize.
I don’t know if Bobbito has changed his stance. Lord knows I’ve changed my stance on many things over the years, but maybe he hasn’t. It’s obvious that as the godfather of the culture we now know and love - he was writing from a moment he wanted to protect. And I respect that. And I agreed with it for a long time. But for me, the Jordan 1 has become something I don’t need to defend or dismiss. It’s not my favorite shoe. It’s not the best shoe. It doesn’t even make sense as a basketball shoe (anymore).
But it is the shoe that absorbed every version of the culture and stayed legible anyway.
Maybe it didn’t deserve the hype in 1985. Maybe it did.
But nearly forty years later, it feels like it earned something else by taking the long way around.