Don’t believe the (trainer) hype

Illustration by Jack Holland

Nothing beats your first wear (unless it’s a pair of blister inducing leather derbies, then in that case ready your ankles for pain). To parade my New Balance 992s in the wild I chose a dry day on a footpath that had just opened (do footpaths open?) in town for a scuff free walk with zero suede induced headaches. I’m readying potential outfits for future outings beyond April 12th, but for now that still remains their solo outing. Owning a new pair of trainers is quite rare for me, I reckon it could be the first time I’ve switched up my trainer style in five years. When my head was turned from Common Projects to a collaboration between New Balance 992 and Jjjjound, it must’ve meant I really, really (really!) liked them. If I was telling you the abridged version then there’s nothing more to say other than I did not buy them. But if you want to read a tale about hope, heartbreak and overpriced second chances, then read on. 

To set the scene, let me take you back to last August. I am new to trainer culture and the whole community around it is something I do not have much knowledge on. There is the inner circle of Thursday queues and overnight campers for release day (pre-pandemic), the causal outer fringes that own a pair of Yeezys and then next to that group there’s me. I would consider this a short story on someone who dipped in, discovered the world of resale and dipped out. I owe my naivety over what was to follow down to the fact that this was all very new to me and thought I would be able to walk away with a pair of New Balance 992 x Jjjjound trainers with no hiccups and be inducted into the outer circle. I had entered four raffles. Messaged friends about drop times the evening before. I was clicking refresh on websites that were stocking them. It was a safe bet. There was little doubt in my mind that they would be on my feet by the following week. And then the rejection started to land in my inbox. And for me, as someone who contemplates new purchases probably a little too long before committing, I felt pretty disappointed I was not able to get them. Now this is where I would like to say that this is the end of the story and I just moved on with my life, but I took that L(oss) in August personally and I still wanted them. 

My first port of call was Depop, then Grailed and after that my first foray onto Stock X. All three were getting regular pings from my IP address to see if I could get my hands on a pair and yes, there were pairs in my size. But getting them was going to cost me a premium, a 182% premium on the retail price to be exact. Again, I wish I could say I just moved on and accepted defeat but no, it seemed that a combination of hype and knowing they were available had gripped me. I switched between multiple tabs and YouTube videos telling me how it was the collaboration of the year, while simultaneously zooming in on my phone to inspect the stitching on the midsole for pairs I had found online. I was watching these videos that were effectively telling me the exact same information: the history of the 992 silhouette, Steve Jobs’ fondness for the style and the US factory build quality. I lapped up each and every second and cooed at the “on foot” - a frequent YouTuber saying - every single time. The Jjjjound collaboration cast a sneaker spell on my sole and I had temporarily become trainer obsessed. 

Towards the end of last year, I had managed to pull myself away from frequent searches and had given up on getting any, but they came back to haunt me at the start of March. I honed in on a listing after a quick search while having lunch, in my size and at a price that I thought I could part with. The seller was being probed by yours truly for additional photos and various questions that probably didn’t need to be asked - a bit like those who ask for the pit-to-pit on a £10 t-shirt on Depop. In hindsight I count myself fortunate that a) my first couple of offers were rebuffed for my bank account’s sake and b) I didn’t end up on @depopdrama. I returned to the videos and Reddit threads and now I wonder if I was looking to read something to put me off the price tag. When the standard 992s restocked I eventually saw sense. 

I became low-key obsessed with wanting them and now stepping back from it all, now owning a very similar pair... what was I thinking? When you are searching regularly on the resale market you start to forget the RRP and slowly start to try and justify the new price you are seeing. This hype culture narrative is then reinforced by websites such as The Drop Date, a place dedicated to as they say “organising the chaos”, Highsnobiety and Hypebeast writing so many trainer articles I can’t quite keep up and a store like MrSneaker that only sells the most limited hyped shoes. 

While my experience in resale prices was short lived, it has set me off on a line of thought: should resale even be a thing if it creates a divide between those who can afford and those who cannot? There is a backdoor to the trainers you want, but only if you’ve got the money to buy your way in. This also isn’t helped with videos online centred around how much an outfit costs and correlating cost with style. For me the frustration is that the market is setup for disappointment. You have brands creating trainers in quantities so limited and you have proxies buying them up so quickly that the people who genuinely wanted them falling short. Perhaps this part of a bigger conversation and I am sure there will be a good argument as to why the model is the way it is, but for me it does not add up in a system where those who want to buy an item to wear cannot and those who buy them purely for resale have the magic formula. 

And that’s the story of my hype trainer ordeal. As the saying goes, it is better to have nearly bought a pair of highly covetable trainers, than to of never tried to buy them at all. Or something like that.jbicon

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