Rob Heppler has been through some things. A teenage party in the late '90s and what ensued landed him in jail and forced him to throw away his new Adidas Ozweegos (which I remember were the shiznit at the time).Rob was incarcerated, and the story of his jail time and the role sneakers played in his and other inmates' lives in prison made for an interesting story. I was taken aback a little.
Check it out here.
It's so funny: when I was sooo poor growing up, I would do the same thing with my sneakers (typically only one pair a year, purchased, after the 8th grade, by me): wash, scrub, laces soles toothbrush newspaper dry. And I was hard on shoes b/c I rode my bike everywhere, in the rain.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to dismiss the specific perspective that this article sheds light on, but disenfranchisement is, well, disenfranchisement... and since about 1978 when Nike hit the ground running (pun intended toward their first really aggressive marketing stance), IT has truly been ABOUT the shoes.
-- er, "kicks" like you young'uns say now'a days.......
My memory only goes back to about the time that Nike started blossoming, but I do remember a litle of the old days when sneakers weren't statements of wealth. They were like all the othet shoes in the closet, something that you tried to take care of and something also that you didn't get too many of.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to pinopint exactly when that changed, but sure enough it did. You then had two camps: the trendsetters willing to pay ever more ridiculous amounts for their Nikes and Reeboks and the supposed "smarter" people who bragged about wearing pure shit because it was cheap and potentially messing up their feet in the meantime by wearing them to death.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but this story certainly made me think about what seems inconsequential and trivial to the outside world can change entirely behind bars.