These Dior x Nike Air Jordan 1 Highs are the French brand’s first collaboration with the sneaker giant.
They are part of a growing community of traders who buy limited-edition, difficult-to-source trainers from brands including Nike and Adidas, and luxury labels such as Chanel, then resell them – marked up – to “sneakerheads”, trainer lovers willing to spend hundreds or thousands on shoes. Basketball icon Michael Jordan wore this Air Jordan 1 pair in 1985 during his dispute with the NBA over his choice of footwear. The iconic trainers were auctioned for $560 000 in 2020.
“Since the lockdown started we’ve had hundreds of thousands of first-time sellers,” says Olivier Van Calster at StockX, the world’s largest trainer reselling marketplace. “At the start of the pandemic we saw a few weeks of real slowdown as people were asking themselves, ‘What’s happening here?’, but very quickly we saw a bounce-back and an incredible acceleration.”
“As a youth-based anti-establishment movement, sneakers were perfect as an official part of [hip-hop],” Williams adds. “They were a uniform.” “A lot of people took it as a connotation,” Williams says. “They said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with all-black shoes?’ ” The British rap artist M1llionz says: “It has become a big competition over who can get the most exclusive trainers. People are more likely to listen [to your music] or watch your videos if they know you’re wearing limited-edition shoes – ones they haven’t seen before.”
As well as celebrity backing, trainers are made popular by limiting the quantity produced. Even if a manufacturer can churn out half a million shoes for a fraction of the unit cost of making 5 000 – due to production, marketing and design costs – they won’t. They’ll deliberately maintain a high degree of scarcity.Trainers are now fully integrated through popular culture, no longer just a sports shoe.
Bots – short for robots – are software programs that carry out automated repetitive tasks, imitating human user activity. They trick the brand’s website with computer code, allowing the user to re-enter themselves into the raffle hundreds of times over.