Just Do It. Change the Game. Feet You Wear. Turn It On. If you'd just spent the past five years in a Kashmiri ice-cave, you could be forgiven for mistaking these three-word rubrics for the hypnotic urgings of a televisual self-help guru, or perhaps the haggard rantings of some PVC-clad, nipple-ringed foot fetishist. The rest of us, feet anchored firmly on Planet Reebok, breathing rarefied Nike air, instantly recognise the pervasive battle cries for the hearts and soles of a generation, painstakingly etched into the collective unconscious by all manner of febrile hype-meisters.
The trainer-mania that holds a hefty slab of the globe's youth in its tight-laced grip has in the past 12 months reached hysterical proportions, spawning an academia of trainer historians and sneaker semioticians and a wild, thriving marketplace where hot models change hands for ludicrous sums. You would be safer playing chicken with a minibus driver than dawdling outside Mong Kok's 'trainer row', Fa Yuen Street, on the days a new Nike line is released. For the cognoscenti, even a simple outing to a pub or club can be swiftly transformed into a rampant orgy of trainer-spotting; where 'new schoolers' strut their latest Nike Zoom Flights, Air Rifts and Air Footscapes, and 'old school' luddites sport inchoate Puma States.
Debates rage late into the night over pressing points of perambulatory preference. Nike's Air Max or Reebok's Pump Fury? Adidas Samba or Puma Suede? The Grant Hill III or the Air Jordan XII? Wardrobes bulge with teetering towers of shoeboxes where lovingly tended trainers rest in soft tissue beds, brought forth only on special occasions. Nick Compton, in a recent issue of style-BibleThe Face, suggests: 'Ironically, the trainer, conceived as footwear for everyman, has become the most sophisticated indicator of our place in the intricate taste/fashion/lifestyle caste system of the late 20th century. It's our primary sign system, a street-level resume of all that we are and all that we want to be. We define ourselves and are defined by our trainers.' On the mean streets of Los Angeles or Chicago, you might even be shot for them.
At the top of the trainer heap is Nike, propelled to its pinnacle by a combination of seamless marketing, innovative design and crafty prescience in sponsorship choices. From that serendipitous moment in the early 1980s that fused a basketballing Rookie of the Year named Michael Jordan with a bag full of air squashed in the heel of a boot, the company has scarcely put a trainer-shod foot wrong. Shaking off its 1980s aerobic boom hangover is Reebok, now snapping at Nike's heels with a host of funky new designs and technology it claims will make its competitor look full of hot Air. Adidas completes the trainer trinity, receiving a huge shot in the arm over the past three or four years from the just-fading retro trend, which saw old school triple-striped trainers like the Superstar, Gazelle, Rome, Tobacco and Trim-Trab arise from their dusty 1970s shoeboxes and once again tread fashion's lofty byways.
IF THE US is the backbone of the trainer industry, then Japan provides a kind of crazy spinal cord, shooting weird impulses the length and breadth of trainerdom. Fat glossy magazines devoted to nothing but arcane trainer facts and minutae are reverently pored over and prices and models memorised. The cover of the latest Boon Extra lingers in loving detail on the sublime slate-grey lines and green-gelled gestalt of the 1995 Nike Air Max, the current Holy Grail of new school trainer enthusiasts.
Ask for a pair of these in any Hong Kong sports store and you will be either looked at pityingly or laughed at. Released for a recommended retail price of around $850, these babies currently change hands for upwards of $6,000 - if you can find someone willing to part with them. They were listed as the Most Indispensable Item of the Year in The Face's annual Fashion Awards this month.
