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In a World Where I Designed the Shoes

Tuesday, April 6, 2010 | 2 Comment(s)

Recently, my friend Andrew has got me surfing the web for shoes. He is extremely knowledgeable about sneaker history, design, and production. I, on the other hand, really like neato shoes. While this seems incongruent, you would be surprised how much knowing what you like overlaps with an established taste or ascetic (they are actually the same thing--just personal taste vs. public tastes). So anyways, Andrew hits up this site called Corgi Shoe, which is a blog by a guy in California who has worked for shoe companies and has stockpiled a crap-load of limited release and special edition shoes. He also loves his Corgis (the dog). He has pictures of his dogs tattooed on his arms. I think that's super cool. Anyways, every week he puts up a few new pairs from his collection and offer them up to interested buyers. He fields emails and negotiates for reasonable prices and is, by Andrew's account, a super nice dude. It was through his site that I found the shoes of my dreams.

Behold!!! The Nike "What-the-dunks." In my opinion, the most beautiful shoes I have ever seen. And I am deadly serious. It looks like someone crawled into my brain, took all my shoe design ideas, and made these shoes. Because, if I were to design a pair of shoes, you better believe that i would pile every single one of those good ideas into that single pair. And I wouldn't care that the shoes looked nothing like each other. All the better! Hell, my socks never matched in high school, I don't see why my shoes have to match in my 30's. I mean, these bad boys have: tie dye, logos, numbers, pavement patterns, raincoat patterns, plaid, and my very favorite thing, the backs. Look at the genius:


Not only do they say different things, but those linings are completely different materials and the color combos are killer. Brilliant.

But there has to be a punch line. You just know there does. In this case, before Andrew emailed Corgi for me, we did a quick internet search to see the going rate of these bad boys.

Drumroll . . . $1000-$1200. Jigga-WHAT! Full-stop. Record needle scratches off the record.

That's insane. I mean that's like Carrie Bradshaw insane. I guess Nike should hire me to design shoes, cause my soul's shoes are like, wicked friggin expensive.

Corgi wrote back that he'd gotten one offer of around $600 for the pair. Probably could get them for around that price. And if I'm being honest, for about 30 seconds I actually contemplated buying a $600 dollar pair of shoes . . .

But let's face it. Even a grad student can't rationalize spending a month's rent on a pair of shoes (though I did drop that kinda cash on 2001 Red Sox World Series Tickets [totally worth it]). So, if there are any millionaire philanthropist blog fans, now you know what to get me for my . . . well . . . for my anything.

2 comments:

  1. (1) Love the Carrie Bradshaw reference.
    (2) I totally get not spending $600 on shoes with our salary...but I would totally support you if you did it. Those shoes are B.A.

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  2. AH-MAZE-ING!
    there really are no words to capture the AH-MAZE-ING-NESS of these shoes.
    (maybe we should buy some lottery tickets) :)

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