Sorry about this. I promised I'd treat my story like a blog entry in the hopes that it'd make the process smoother. Didn't work exactly. Still gonna post it. We don't have to come up with headlines. In fact, we're discouraged from it. Any suggestions?
BTW, this hasn't been edited by anyone other than me, and I'm tired as hell, so keep your snarky comments to yourself. I'd love to go to sleep, but I have to do my readings for tomorrow's law class.
At some point, I might start putting my radio pieces up, because one thing every good journalist needs is an over-developed ego.
If you do have criticisms, I would like to hear them. Just email me them. I prefer to take my abuse in private. M knows that.
Kerok Vazquez never got into baseball cards. Stamps and comic books don’t excite him either.
For him, it’s all about sneakers, and when he finds a pair that matches his finely-tuned sense of style, he gets enough to last.
“I normally buy two,” Vazquez said, “one to rock; one to stock.”
Sometimes he’ll buy three. Once, five.
Vazquez, 21, belongs to a subculture whose members refer to themselves as sneakerheads. Sneakerheads amass limited-release, designer sneakers. Many sell the shoes for large profits; Vazquez savors his the way a wine connoisseur cherishes a rare Bordeaux.
Vazquez’s cellar is his closet, where he estimates he has stocked around 200 pairs of sneakers, all categorized by color and style. He said he pastes pictures of the shoes on the outsides of the boxes so he can quickly locate the pair he’s looking for.
The closet is reserved for shoes that he only wears on special occasions. Those shoes either hold sentimental value or are worth more money than he originally paid. He estimates one pair, incredibly rare Nike sneakers with a pigeon stitched on them, is worth $2,500. He doesn’t plan to sell them, but he can’t bring himself to wear them, because they’re too valuable.
Other sneakers have a set number of times he’ll wear them.
“The sneakers may be ill, but you know you can’t wear those more than like three, four times,” Vazquez said, “because once it gets creased, it just doesn’t look the same.”
He isn’t hurting for sneakers he can wear.
“I have like 45 pairs that I put in rotation,” Vazquez said.
That rotation is tightly regulated. On Wednesday, he wore a red baseball cap and light blue shirt – both colors were on his Air Jordans. His pants, slightly off-white, were the exact shade found on the sneakers.
Vazquez’s obsession with collecting sneakers wasn’t a conscious decision.
“It pretty much just happened,” Vazquez said. “You just keep stocking and stocking, and you just realize, ‘I got a lot of sneakers.’ But it’s not like you really want to stop.”
Vazquez doesn’t plan to stop. In fact, he recently opened a store in his native Williamsburg, where he sells the designer sneakers he loves so much.
He got the capital to open his business from savings he collected while working as a dental assistant. The business is successful enough that he can continue to support his shoe habit.
The business is also beneficial, because it gives him access to shoes at cost. He no longer has to spend $120 to $300 on a pair. Still, Vazquez said it isn’t uncommon for him to spend up to $2000 on shoes in a month.
Most credit for the sneakerhead phenomenon is given to Nike. Their Air Jordan basketball shoes have consistently made fans line up at stores on release dates.
Nike created new fervor by making limited edition sneakers. With Dunks, colorful lines of sneakers that usually adhere to a theme, Nike appealed to consumers eager to display their individuality on their feet. Comic book aficionados salivated over shoes based on Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk.
The craze for these shoes meant big profits for early opportunists who bought up many pairs of the shoes and sold them for higher prices on eBay. Nike’s Pigeon Dunks, the prize of Vazquez’s collection, command a huge price, because only 150 pairs were made.
Nevett Steele owns a skate shop on North 11th Street in Williamsburg, and he said that he instituted a policy limiting sales to one pair per customer in order to curb the opportunists.
“That’s how they pay their rent,” said Steele. “People were making more money hustling sneakers than hustling drugs. And it was legal.”
Even though companies such as Nike don’t get any part of the higher resale prices, they capitalize on the buzz such prices create.
Ion Bogdan Vasi is an assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He teaches a course on the sociology of consumerism, and he said sneaker companies have attained something rare.
“Creating this emotional attachment,” said Vasi, “it’s the holy grail of advertisements – creating a sort of irrational emotional attachment to the product.”
But just because the attachment is irrational doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.
“…if you have one or more sneakers that are highly sought after by other people,” Vasi said, “then you’re obviously in a different social group, a different category. You create distinction, you create status, you are distinguishing yourself from the other people.”
Vazquez said he doesn’t collect sneakers to make money. Nor does he do it for the sake of collecting. He judges every shoe on its own merit. Plenty of shoes don’t make the cut, but plenty do.
“You can’t neglect a good pair of sneakers,” Vazquez said. “If it’s good…you got to have them.”
