Last year, MSCHF, the creative collective from the New York borough of Brooklyn that calls itself the Banksy of consumer culture, presented his “Satan Shoes”, a collaboration with Lil Nas X which included a modified Nike Air Max 97 with a little blood and diabolical symbology. For this reason, the company unleashed a great controversy, as well as a lawsuit from Nike.
In the end, sales stopped and the product, though not its shadow, disappeared from the internet. Now, however, its inventors are back on the mission, and not with another attention-grabbing craziness.
It is a complete line of sports shoes. It’s like a combination of Nike with Supreme and Warhol.
The collection, called MSCHF Sneakers, will be sold through an app and on its own website, and it will take the form of monthly releases of different styles, priced at nearly $220 a pair. Unlike previous sports shoes from MSCHF —Satan’s shoe; his predecessor, the Jesus shoe (a pair of Nikes containing holy water); or the Birkinstock (some Birkenstocks made with a Hermès Birkin bag)—, neither style will be a modification of existing footwear; They will be completely original. That’s not to say they don’t have references or a little subversion of contemporary golden calves.
The first model, the TAP3, which goes on sale Monday, is a direct nod to recent history: a shape and leather sole that are very reminiscent of the Nike Air Force 1, wrapped in “packaging tape” cuts. MSCHF thermoplastic polyurethane overmold” that have been permanently fused to the body of the shoe (oddly reminiscent of the recent Balenciaga show, in which Kim Kardashian arrived wrapped in branded packaging tape). The shoes come in a familiar-looking orange cardboard box, with distinctive parts apparently covered in packing tape.
It comes with a roll of matching packing tape.
Although there have been no reactions yet, it seems that they are tempting fate. What were they thinking?
This is what MSCHF (which is made up of co-founder Daniel Greenberg, creative director Kevin Wiesner, and creative director Lukas Bentel, but, like Vetements and Maison Martin Margiela once did, like to talk as a collective) pointed out when I asked. This extended email exchange has been edited and summarized.
Q: Seriously, why start with a Nike reference?
A: The rough shape of the AF1 has become the platonic ideal of a low top shoe. The first thing every brand that is trying to break into the world of sneakers does is make a pseudo-AF1. That cultural ubiquity makes it an attractive target. And, let’s be honest, it’s a bit cathartic for us to release that particular shoe almost exactly a year after the release of the Satan shoes.
Also, in a way, the entire MSCHF Sneakers program is our guarantee that we can do whatever we want. When thinking about footwear, there are dozens of ideas that we had for years and years that we knew with modifications just weren’t possible. We had to ask ourselves: did we really want to do all this work for the reward? The clear answer was yes. We have been working quietly for almost a year on this model.
Q: Was it a drastic learning curve, starting from scratch?
A: Obviously, there was a significant learning curve. That said, while we don’t necessarily know how to make shoes, the shoe factories and designers didn’t necessarily know how to make our designs either. As the show continues, our exit gets progressively weirder and weirder. Somehow, having no sense of industry norms freed us from limitations. We’re opening up the sole tools for each shoe again because we didn’t know that was considered crazy.
Q: Why sports shoes?
A: Sports shoes are a rich cultural format. They find themselves in the middle of a strange nexus between fashion, collecting, hype beasts and investing, or more accurately, the alleged financial mess of sneakers. There’s a feeling that the shoe space has reached a kind of zenith where everything is a collaboration and companies generate hype around launches practically on a daily basis. But from our perspective, everything can be taken much further. Who cares about endless “new” releases that are just color scheme versions? For an object that is supposed to encapsulate extreme-end capitalism, shoes can still get a whole lot more fun.
We knew there was more meat in there that we wanted to play with in the future, and after Satan’s shoes, it was clear that we would have to remove any external dependencies in order to have creative freedom.
Q: What did you learn from the experience with Satan’s shoes?
A: A lot about copyright law, the First Amendment, and the first sale doctrine, but in the end it reinforced what we already knew: Get off other people’s platforms. For anyone who has never been on the receiving end of lawyers for a massive corporation, let’s just say it’s horrible. In the end, Nike says we did nothing wrong and we say Nike did nothing wrong by suing us. That doesn’t mean it was hunky-dory.
Q: Why are your shoes different?
The thing is that a lot of our shoes are not what you would imagine shoes or footwear to be, so you could argue that we have an advantage over any other shoe designer because we take what we have in mind and make it. We can literally go into Photoshop, take an iconic shoe, put it in a blender, and then make it. Some of our upcoming shoes actually started with some team members messing around with Photoshop and are now becoming actual mass-produced sneakers. You might see something like this next month.
Q: Any other clues as to what comes next?
In many ways, the TAP3 is a bit of a fake, as it’s a very recognizable sneaker shape. We’ve got some shoes lined up that are collaborations with well-known musical artists, and we’ll be appropriating some iconic shoe shapes. Also, when it comes to footwear, we won’t just make shoes. We’ll do what we want. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
