Air Jordan is an integral part of basketball culture, and here’s why:
The original sneakers are auctioned off as the first scene of the Ben Affleck-directed film “Air,” “Air,” with Matt Damon and Viola Davis, begins. Ellie Violet Bramley examines the unstoppable rise of the ultimate cult shoe.
Trainers must be fairly special if a secondhand pair can get between $2 million and $4 million. A pair of Michael Jordan’s Nike Air Jordan 13s from the second game of the 1998 NBA Finals, widely known as “the last dance,” will be put up for sale by Sotheby’s. The most expensive pair of shoes to ever enter the market are these.
Sotheby’s says that a pair of trainers worn by Jordan will sell at auction for $1.472 million in 2021. This is the highest ever paid for a pair of trainers at an auction. The fact that the Jordan 13s are expected to sell for more than this record amount shows how rare they are and how great and long-lasting the Jordan brand is.
So what is it that makes Air Jordan so special? The backstory of a new movie called “Air,” in which Matt Damon, Viola Davis, and Ben Affleck star and for which Affleck directed and wrote the script, was unique.
In 1984, when Nike talked to Jordan, he was still a new player at the University of North Carolina. Still, they had to work hard to get him to sign with them. Jordan wanted to sign with Adidas, and Nike was having trouble then. Peter C. Moore, a legendary shoe designer who worked for Nike, was brought in. He is said to have drawn the design for the first Air Jordan on the back of a napkin. It was the first of 35 different styles of Air Jordan shoes that have come out since then.
Jordan’s skill as an athlete is a big reason the shoe has a strong reputation. Drew Haines, the merchandising director of sneakers and collectibles at StockX, an online marketplace and resale site for streetwear and sneakers, says that Jordan’s cultural cachet keeps growing even after he stopped playing.
The myths that grew up around the man himself and how he made it out of the court and into pop culture are also unmatched.
DeLeon says that a lot of the advertising for shoes was more like advertising for cars. He doesn’t know how many pairs he owns, but he got five or six pairs in the last month and has somewhere in the hundreds. In 1989, ads that were “very Spike Lee style,” as DeLeon puts it. They showed Lee as Mars Blackmon, the character he played in the movie She’s Gotta Have It. In the ads, he asks Jordan what makes him the best player in the world, and he says over and over again, “It’s got to be the shoes!” So putting together the ads with Lee was a smart move.
The NBA at first banned the shoe because it was red and black, which was against the rules at the time, which said that players’ shoes had to be mostly white. This gave it a rebellious image, and the fact that the shoe could take a color also helped it stay popular for a long time.
Air Jordan checks the cult appeal box
There have been other athletes who have had their shoe lines. DeLeon mentions Adidas Stan Smiths, endorsed by the famous US tennis player of the same name, and the Converse Chuck Taylor, the “weapon of choice for NBA athletes” when the first Air Jordans came out, according to DeLeon.
“What made the Jordan line especially interesting was that the athlete always managed to stay in the spotlight and be more important than the shoe itself.
Trainers often take over an athlete’s memory after they stop playing. Smith worked with the late, well-known Parisian store Colette and Adidas to bring back a shoe that became the go-to trainer for fashionistas in the 2010s. Smith reportedly opened the door to Colette, and many people were waiting to get in, “so many kids just rushed past him. They didn’t know who he was. Some People Think I’m a Shoe is a book about the man and the coach. “I don’t think Jordans have been like that,” says DeLeon.
It didn’t hurt that Netflix’s The Last Dance, a 10-part documentary series about the rise of the Chicago Bulls with Jordan at the helm, had even people who didn’t know what a slam dunk was three years ago. Around that time in the summer of 2020, the number of people interested in StockX went through the roof.
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Air Jordans have been at the center of more than one argument. The 2020 movie One Man and His Shoes showed how Nike aggressively marketed shoes to kids who couldn’t afford them. They were also the shoes that might have started the sneaker culture we know today.
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