Snake America Thirty-Five
Snake is a bi-weekly electric magazine covering second-market goods, often on eBay. This week: A Marines piping sweatshirt and Nike Trainerposites. Subscribe
eBay: Vintage 1990s Marines sweatshirt with an Eagle on it: Is a 1990s sweatshirt with inlaid embroidery true vintage? Sure. It's also a Rashomon (Japan, 1950) to the Starter script sports sweatshirt, which is alone in being a great piece of vintage from the 1990s. Both have ribbing on the cuffs and waist and collar and are very American. All sweatshirts could be improved with severe cuffs. An improvement on a basic form is rare, but these are in line with the 3" cuffs some 1960s sweatshirts featured. (If you wear the right old sweatshirt, your arms will look like frosting dispensers.) Tight cuffs also make the decade's mostly loose fits look slimmer--this one for sale is an XL, but doesn't look it. Both this and the Starter share material--looks like shellacked cotton. It's actually 50 cotton, 50 polyester. Starters have a 65 cotton 35 poly blend.
I'm not sure what that means on a molecular level, though. 1990s Starters are outstanding but hard to find for non-trash teams and sizes and with hoods. For taste, a Starter sweatshirt is the best vintage article of clothing to proclaim NFL fandom. 1980s football sweatshirts don't exist... the few that do look like they're made out of paper. The Cliff Engel sweater, which Coach Michael Ditka used to wear, is too much. New stuff is too much but in a different way. This Marines sweatshirt is debatably too much. A bit loud. It's more jarring than the soft middle space an evocative 1990s vintage sports sweatshirt occupies. It may not work. It's worth noting some 1950s Champion crewnecks look like both the Starters and this Marine. They're different in every other way but they look alike. That they're not totally different is something.
eBay: 1990s Trainer Posites with box, cheap Buy It Now: Now this begs some questions. The shoe is an Alpha Project, their premium line from the late 1990s. It's if not a mysterious chapter in Nike lore, at least one like Chapters 6 and 17 in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars (USA 2004), the first drafts of which were written and reported(1) not by Col but by his researcher Griff Witte. In Journalism Dean Coll's own words, Witte, a "2000 graduate in history from Princeton University and a former reporter for the Miami Herald .... an ideal collaborator and essential to the entire project." So ... a different chapter. Nike killed Alpha Project Feb. '99. I just thought they were the shoes in the grey boxes. Seemingly–unrelated shoes, which included: Zoom Havens, which resemble Diesel sneakers and come in very bright yellow, Zoom Seismics, a runner that is puffy but not fat, Nike Air Max MXs that look like luxury runners from 2013, this one weird shoe that looks like a Tom Sachs Cortez, 2000s ...
My math has Project lasting past Feb. '99 into late '99. Annuary Air Maxes--'95s, 2003s, in our case 2000s, etc--are generally released the summer beforehand. Or that year? As much as I like the idea of an Ad Week story hitting the shelves then prompting Nike's accounting goons to drive through the Alpha Project wing on Nike Campus in golf carts swinging bats, destroying cubicles and mock-ups and flying goons overseas to sabotage factories like thieves in the night, that probably didn't happen. Those grey boxes were in stores past 2000. They probably just kept making shoes until they ran out of boxes. But what a confusing collection of shoes. In 1998-9, the NBA was without Michael Jordan and swooning; Jordan retros were failures(2) and his new shoes were diminishing(3). Nike also company faced and would face vocal, if not serious, opposition(4) to its sweatshop manufacturing practices. Their shoeboxes were black with a clay top:
Their boxes eventually went to all orange. The shoe in the auction above is even more captivating than box evolution. It's between a Flightposite and a Clogposite. The Flightposite looked like elegant molten lava, the II like a snail's outside body. Kevin Garnett wore them in Minnesota. The Clogposite was the first Flightposite but a slide, with an open heel. For the home. The abovelinked Trainerposite was neither. They meant it for the gym. Not sure how it became part of Nike's swoon-era premium line. Maybe they snuck it in after the hammer fell. It's great when mistakes like these happen. Whatever's set to be revered tomorrow is happening now and is the brother of today's stupidest, smallest thing. It's out there now. Where, though?
Thanks for reading,
Snake
Last Snake: WWII aviator boots; Rich Person Pen (Relevant Errata: Felix Havoc was in Destroy, not in Disrupt.)
Snake before that: 2014 year-end wrap-up
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(1) I think re: the and reported. I'm sure Coll called some people, come on.
(2) The '99 Black-Red-White Jordan IV is widely regarded as the first really successful Jordan retro, selling out in some stores instantly. But ... and this is anecdotal ... the other retros didn't do as well. It's worth explicity stating that Nike's only other retro release--Jordan I through IIIs in 1994 and 1995--failed commercially to the point of all three models hitting $20 sales tables. Stateside stock, legend has it, was eventually cleared out by the Japanese.
(3) XIIIs, released in '98, are classic. But come on.
(4) All old pages... like '98, '99.