Tim Nudd, adfreak.comMid-1980s. Junior high school in Mokena, Ill. Kid (not me) walks out of the locker room wearing the original $100-plus red-and-black-and-white Air Jordans. A brief pause—has time stopped? Then a sudden giant sucking sound, as any vestiges of non-materialistic attitudes are vacuumed, Exorcist-like, from our little 11-year-old brains. Few of us would ever end up with a pair of Air Jordans, but there wasn’t a single one of us who didn’t want them.
From that day a couple decades ago, it’s a fairly straight shot to this year’s Wimbledon, where Nike has given Maria Sharapova 10 pairs of absurd, gold-encrusted tennis shoes worth $600 a pair.
These shoes are ridiculous. Even Sharapova seems a bit baffled by their existence.
“They shine unbelievably,” she said this week. “Hopefully, that will distract my opponents a little bit.”
If Air Jordans ushered in the age of modern consumer culture, the Sharapova fashion show might be the perfect expression of it. And it’s not just shoes. The Russian teenager is also set to debut a “sort of cloak with gold details and a gold zipper” and a “summer dress with orange details on it.”
If she doesn’t win this tournament, won’t she end up looking a bit foolish?
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