A shoddy business

from theage.com.au

A new documentary explores the journey of the humble sneaker from ghetto counter-culture to the very centre of global capitalism. Luke Benedictus reports.

Growing up in the Bronx in the early 1980s, Lisa Leone went to school with members of the Rock Steady Crew, the famous breakdancing posse. "We never thought of it like a 'movement'," the 39-year-old filmmaker says over the phone from New York. "It was just a bunch of kids dancing and having fun."

But even though hip-hop was still in its embryonic stages, footwear was already the ultimate expression of street style. "I had a pair of Puma Clydes and a drawer full of laces of all different colours," Leone remembers.

"Every night before school I would lay out my outfit and relace my sneakers with different colours - like the yellow with the red or something. I did it every night, like a religion."

Leone and Frenchman Thibaut De Longeville have put their shared obsession with sneakers to good use as directors of Just For Kicks, a documentary about "sneakers, hip-hop and the corporate game".

The film investigates how the humble gym shoe morphed from a jock essential to a $US26 billion ($A35 billion) industry as big business cashed in on a form of street fashion popularised in the US by breakdancers, rappers and graffiti artists. Today, only 20 per cent of trainers are sold for sporting purposes; the bulk of sales come under the "lifestyle" category.

Just For Kicks - which screens at ACMI this week as part of Resfest, a "global festival dedicated to profiling digital film, music, art, design and technology" - suggests it was breakdancers who first changed the perception of the sneaker.

Needing practical footwear to pull off their gravity-defying moves, breakdancers opted for the latest wares from adidas and Puma, stimulating the shoes' popularity.

The shoelaces were an intrinsic part of the early look. Many people in the budding ghetto scene could only afford one pair of sneakers, so laces were a way of freshening up the look.

As a self-proclaimed "hip-hop scholar" in Just For Kicks insists, "A sneaker without fly laces is like having a gun without the bullets".

To pull off a more menacing image, many began ditching the laces altogether, mimicking the regulation in US jails that forced prisoners to remove their shoestrings so they couldn't use them to hang themselves. Rap group Run DMC favoured the no-laces approach as part of their stick-up kid look.

With My adidas, a rap tribute to their favourite brand, the group is credited with forcing the giant sportswear companies to recognise the potential of marketing their footwear directly to the street.

Just For Kicks includes rare footage of a pivotal concert that an adidas marketing executive attended. During the rendition of My adidas, the rappers incited the crowd to hold their sneakers in the air. When the executive witnessed thousands of pairs of adidas being waved aloft, the scale of the phenomenon hit home. The band was promptly handed a $US1 million deal with adidas.

"Run DMC made the world understand that the sneaker is to hip-hop what the crucifix is to the Christians," says Mathieu Kassovitz, director of cult French film La Haine.

The other breakthrough in the sneaker boom was Nike's decision to sponsor a promising rookie basketball player named Michael Jordan.

The NBA insisted that players wore shoes that were predominantly white, but Jordan's first line of basketball boots were black and red. Each time he stepped on court Jordan was fined, but Nike happily covered the costs, knowing that the shoes were gaining a highly marketable renegade edge.

When Jordan subsequently established himself as basketball's biggest superstar, the trainers' selling power rocketed. By the early '90s, claims Just For Kicks, one in every 12 Americans owned a pair of Air Jordans.

Leone admits she's uneasy about the commercial takeover of the sneaker from its hip-hop roots. "It's turned into this corporate, mass-market, disgusting monster," she says.

And while Just For Kicks is essentially a light-hearted celebration of sneaker culture that doesn't go near the issue of the off-shore sweatshops where the shoes are actually made ("That's another film in itself," says Leone), in its own understated way it does highlight the way trainers have become another form of capitalist consumption.

Another point the film raises is how the most obsessive sneaker freaks are invariably male. Leone concedes that she's moved away from trainers herself ("I lost it, I got older and got into, like, Manolo Blahniks"). But she has a theory about why, in New York at least, trainer fetishes tend to be a strangely male affliction.

"A lot of people relate them to men's attitude towards their cars," she says. "In LA, you have the car culture; in New York, we don't have that so much. Sneakers are like a guy's wheels. They're what they use to get around every day."