Snake America Forty Eight
Snake is a bi-weekly magazine covering salable items. Today, metal Nike Air Max BWs and a biker vest. On the web? Subscribe.
eBay: Nike Copper Air Max BW, small size: We flatter ourselves to think the digital trail is the true one, but it's hard to track down an indescribable thing. What are these shoes called? I know they're Air Max BWs, but the colorway--actually, the material. What is it? Weird, shiny krylon silver? Fake metal? Turte-shell? The best descriptor for these shoes is "Belgian Footlocker 2002," a worthless search term if not a song title. Nike made a bunch of runners with this material, all hard, all in Europe, mostly BWs... I'm not sure when Air Jordans became available in Europe but they weren't everywhere like they were here. Only some reached stores, and only some stores. As recently as a decade ago most major European cities were lucky to have one full size run of good Jordans. Fine sneakers in, say, Brussels, were mostly found at Footlocker, or JD Sports in England, each of which had scores of styles of slightly different shoes. Almost always runners, better than anything stateside. The infrared Air Max 90, the best-known old running shoe in this country, is a good example of how much better things were abroad. The shoe was first retroed in Australia (?) in 2002, and a year later in Europe only. Neither release perfectly replicated the original scheme:
The 2002 release of the Air Max '90 was the closest we've ever been to an original pair, utilizing "Mx Orange" as their key accent color. ... Although [the 2003 releases] do appear identical to the naked eye, the 2003 AM '90 tones down the use of orange and sports the more pink look we've grown used to with the "Infrared" Air Max '90...
Infrared is not Infrared and Mx Orange is. The shoe was then retroed in America in 2005, 2008 and 2010(1). I found a pair of BWs in brown, too big, loose in a duty-free crate at the Ben Gurion airport before a flight home. Late 2002. The silver ones were plentiful but in small sizes. The only people, then and now, I saw in them were these three Norwegian guys at my college gym who all worked out together. Mostly light weights, and who wore tapered track pants. It's been hard to track down the myriad permutations of European Footlocker sneakers because they were distributed so broadly. Five rows of shoes and eight columns, floor to ceiling in every chain sneaker store in every European town. One chain store's bottom row would be different than another's so you had to check every one. None of them have proper names and the slang term, Euro/Can, is out of favor. The only person I saw wearing the original Infrared 90s was a homeless man, also during college.
eBay: Outlaw biker vest, vintage: What I don't know about motorcycle culture fills a warehouse. These vests are great, though. Usually when you do something to clothing, like patch up some Levi's, it ruins it. Not here. This is a western chambray vest and it looks cheap. Pearl or fake buttons. It's safe to say this vest would not be tough or cool without its motorcycle affiliation. HELL is in quotations in red and the other words are blue. There's that story about how Doo-Wop was big in some working class Los Angeles neighborhoods where incarceration rates were steadily high because prisoners, in the can, were allowed to listen to either the Christian or the oldies station only and they took oldies. When they got out of the joint and back to their families they wanted to listen to Fabian. Can you blame them? That's tougher than listening to heavy music like DMX or Megadeth in the can, since you have to do that anywyays. ... Aaron Neville wears these kinds of vests and he has a face tattoo now. ... I will say the most impressive thing about motorcycle culture is that it's borderless. Many legitimately scary and reputable outlaw motorcycle groups--OMGs(2)--in Canada. Wearing the wrong vest in British Columbia is as as scary as making that mistake in Oakland. Not sure that phenomenon is replicated with anything else.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Bulls rings shirt, Morris The Cat shirt (for sale; for sale)
Snake Before that: Sorority paddle, crappy teal lockers (for sale; for sale)
(1) The infrablues, the complementary color released in 1990, was reportedly retroed sometime this past decade, also in Europe only (reportedly)--it's hard to find evidence of a pair. (Not the laser blues, which are paper trash.
(1) I think that a Motorcycle Club is Hell's Angels affiliated, which is why BRMC got into beef that one time. I'm not sure if they got beat up? But that's not true.