A look at the Air Max "95" for Auction Observer 110
Plus enough deals to sink a battleship
Hello and Shebat Salaam. Yesterday was sprint day.
Housecleaning:
Top auction mentioned ends today; rest Saturday and Sun/Mon.
I went deep on the grocery system and Trader Joe’s in my other health newsletter:
I am quoted (liberally) in Dan Nosowitz’s great, long look at Facebook Marketplace (and how helpful it is for occasional vintage steals) on Dwell.
- and stuff I like for — thanks for having me!
Ferrari finally podiumed. Can they sustain it?
Distort 110
It’s Auction Observer 110… the number is the British appellation for the Air Max 95—the architectural sneaker celebrating 30 years this year. It’s called the 110 because over there they cost 110 quid. For the 30 year anni. Nike re-released the shoe (happens like every three years), but this time pretty accurately, with the same big air bubbles as the original, and with PSI markings, which is nice, and with I believe the original box. Because retro shoes are such a profit driver for Nike (speculation, sure—but there’s no R&D for a retro; whereas the new shoes, like the marathon runner I wrote about for Capsule Magazine last year, require models and variations, scientists, etc), they happen more often and when the big ones get re-released they are done with pomp and circumstance.
The 110 that showed up on my radar was through email, an inverted color-scheme version of the original (itself shades of grey and lime green), produced/collaborated upon by MoMA, which sold the shoe on their web store. There was a talk about the shoe and its place in graffiti culture (and New York), hosted by Ben Solomon, and Clayton Patterson (who I believe lived in Ottawa or at least Eastern Ontario) spoke too. For me the shoe’s association is tied to a specific substrate of 1990s hardcore music—the kind Shining Life Press’ Floorpunch book is about. Anyways, it was a widely produced Nike—many things to many people. I didn’t know that the MoMA shoe was a limited thing. I get the MoMA shop’s design emails, mostly for newsletter purposes.
There’s this line my friend Adam Wray said years ago, about how certain sneakers are design objects. Or sculptures was the word that he used. Are they? Are they not? Hard to say. But to me something serious has to explain the lust and magnetic pull these types of shoes have engendered over the past (around) 25 years. It’s cliche to say, because these are sneakers, mostly sold to children, definitely not fashion, but the best of them (usually very old ones) are so well designed that they transcend their medium. More than that… we live in a pretty run of the mill world—the cars on the road, the buildings, the chairs at the taco place, the jeans…. most are not that amazing to look at. If you live in Milan, maybe… (Rome or Paris for sure), or if you work at an old boxing gym, or if you work at Grand Central Oyster Bar… if you do those things you’ll see beautiful objects every day. (A mix of brutalist and classic architecture, and people in Prada), boxing shoes buzz cuts and muscles, and Eero Saarinen chairs… respectively.) It’s not to say it’s not a beautiful world—the untold beauty of the natural world is free and everywhere, but it just has different angles than, like, design objects. All this to mean that the sneakers, 30 years ago jumped out. There was a design language in the 1990s and 2000s that developed organically, through certain (mostly) Nike sneakers. You didn’t need to know what a Pritzker Prize or Compasso D’Oro was to understand that these things looked good… that these sneakers… somehow were incredibly beautiful things.
From there came the understandable push (and cash cow) around these shoes. Who can blame that? The best of them have a lightning effect, maybe just to young people, but to people for sure… they cut through the boredom. Or did. Which speak for themselves. To be sure, there are a million good looking shoes out there… but these ones were at the mall. This made them really the first high level exposure to design… for young people. (Up there with old Sony.) The best of these items are actual design objects.
Famously the handful of breakout sneaker designers at Nike took Gehry-like inspiration from discrete things they saw in the world… just as he built a building to look like a crumpled up napkin, shoes were inspired by jungle cats, the human spine. It reminds me of the golden era comic book guys, how they worked in one medium but were inspired by things well outside of it.
The MoMA shoe feels in part like a full circle moment, a nice payday for the museum store, but more just an acknowledgement that 15, 25, 30 or whatever years on, the young people who bought sneakers are older and a new type of consumer who are more prone to buy buy real adult stuff for the home*.
*There was a discourse about this in the sneaker world I want to say a decade ago: people saying they were sick of having ∞-1 pairs of shoes and would be spending their incremental shoe money on an Eames chair… always an Eames chair.)
In the time being design hasn’t super caught on with the post-sneaker audience like companies had hoped it might. There are many reasons for this… it is easier, practically, to get an n+1 pair of shoes than a couch. There is more payoff—you wear shoes out of the house, and people see them. They are generally less expensive. You don’t have to pick only one. There are aesthetic reasons—sometimes subtler is better for sofas, sometimes louder is better for shoes. Sometimes vice versa, and sometimes the same. It’s just a bit harder to buy a sofa, and even buying smaller things for the house is more invisible… mostly, though, it is very early, there are a lot of things out there, but they haven’t yet been put into lanes. Whatever logistical revolution that puts good, scalable design in our hands—like, say, shoes every year in a mall—has not been figured out yet. People want to buy good furniture… it jumps out at them. It’s just not everywhere.
One last thought—a thing about the old 110s, from 1995, or even a decade ago, is that they don’t live on as vintage. The air bubbles, with some outlier exceptions, pop… and so you can’t wear the shoe. This creates a limited-time good and makes the reissues of these shoes, from a consumer standpoint, necessary. It also, I think, creates a good argument that new is fine. One can probably wear all vintage but one doesn’t have to. Sometimes an occasional reissue, like these white ones (legit good, and only available from Footlocker?) elevate themselves as a design object. Very pleasant, too, that it is not a limited item… that does not piggyback on some small brand or that it sells for a premium or whatever. It’s not that these things are verboten, it’s just neutral when a Nike is just a Nike and not associated with anything else.
Price Results from last week
Lots of hits in mid-April, of the couple-dozen below-market results I tallied the best auctions paying subscribers saw were two Breuer chairs for $275, a Schweitzer metal wall unit for $1,100, two Poulsen pendants for $100 total, a Pesce La Mamma chair for $1,400 (insanity), this Farstrup sling chair for under $100.
1stDibs under $1,000
As usual, 1D is a sleeper market for all aesthetics. Here are the best things I’ve found poking around this week:
Bent Nordsted for Lyskaer lamp for 900—great chrome/silver lamp of the Danish 60s variety, though futuristic. Pendants are probably the best thing after speed skating those people do.
Midcentury poittery lamp with a lacey shade, 700, 500 shipping—pictured. Very similar in style to the ascendant lamps, like Scarpa’s Celestia, highlighted in my Ssense.com story about them last month.
Napier silver piggy bank, $165—I like this, it’s charming and looks like something that might’ve been on a desk in Milan in 1971. Or may have come out of Milan that year or the following.
Brushed aluminum canopy lights, French, $900/set—<Jimmy Buffett voice>if you don’t like Danish pendants, try these brushed aluminum canopy lights they offer sort of a similar aesthetic but don’t have the scalloping that’s so common from Copenhagen work from the 60s.
Doezema bud vase—for the price of a dinner you can have an eternally lasting simple porc/ceramic vase that works with all styles or which at least brings to mind (in a good way) 1976.
Versace Charger plate $400—I have a good friend who believes that once a year one must buy a $1,000 or more piece of clothing on a lark that is out of range, so as to establish, over time… a louder and let’s just say more expensive wardrobe. Distribute the responsibility over the years. Probably the case with Versace dinnerware… this thing is incredible.
Wim Rietveld 1401 chair for Gispen, $900—from 1954, Wim was Gerrit’s kid, this is effectively an early 80s Cassina office chair except 30 years older. Design… dispatches from the future, for money, today. Price slashed, in LA, pretty good deal.
Sele Arte Nove teapot, $440—just a perfect near-camp/sweet/idiotic (compliment) Italian teapot from the ‘60s. Completely ABS plastic, on the
tip I would say—don’t use this to boil water, but on the Snake tip I would say, use this and let the chips fall where they may.Tiffany Swiss Army Knife—really good.
Obs. 110
Offredi Onda chairs for Saporiti, near NY, ends now: House is selling a bunch of old like wood sculptures here, true flea market auction, but among them are these Giovanni Offredi chairs (the Onda, from about 1970), which the house doesn’t note. They run about $700 one, maybe $2,000, but usually the shorter-body ones are for sale. Great seats bridging the #outapocket Italian style to the more bacchanal 80s/Miami look. No Ottoman, $225
Archizoom office chairs, Va.: Saturday… By Paolo Deganello and Gilberto Corretti, made for Archizoom (the best), sometime in the 1970s—I believe these are the Uno arm chairs, from 1973. Rarely/never seen on auction, set of seven here for $100, compare to one from an office furniture store for $1,600. Light your money on fire or don’t… this is America, do what you want.
I like everything on auction (that I write about; hundreds, thousands more miss the cut), but the next few auctions are the ones closest to my personal taste and which rarely (and in one case never ) sell in North America. Instrux on how to bid and win on LiveAuctioneers is here…
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