The other day, as I was musing on the sheer absurdity of *sneaker waste* we are all part and parcel of, I came across this interesting article in Reuters about how they hid some trackers in some shoes that were supposedly being recycled in Singapore but almost all of them ended up at flea markets overseas...quite different than what they said would happen.
As I was trying to decide about how I would write about it…I got a cold DM from this dude @habibithrifts with a batch of photos of a rare Air Jordan 4 (green laser) friends and family sample…he wanted to know if they were real. I’m not well versed on samples (I don’t think many people are), but I showed them to a few people and we were all a bit intrigued…so I posted them on the story to get a crowd-sourced verdict. Needless to say, 300+ votes later…we didn’t have a solid verdict.
So I went back to dude and asked him the story behind them…where did he get them, etc…he told me that he’s a thrifter in India and he mostly sources from the donation bales that are sent to India from the United States. Pretty much the same journey Reuters talked about in their article. Sure, I had heard of these bales, but that’s a whole sector of society that I really know nothing about…so he sent me a few videos showing what it’s like when the bales touch down, plus a whole account full of stuff he’s found and made a business of sending back to the United States. *mind blown*
I told him if he wanted, I could authenticate and attempt to sell the shoes for him, but I would (obviously) need them on hand. He told me he’d send the shoes and within 4 days (!!!) I had a package from India in my mail box.
Sure enough, the shoes were in there. And, upon closer inspection, I do believe they’re fake.
Obviously, we were hoping upon hope that they were real because, with the tiny amount produced we could have probably actually traced *where they came from and *exactly how they ended up where they did, but no we can’t. BOOOOOOO