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A few days ago, the New York Post took some time off from blasting the city and running sensational headlines to explore the little sneaker world that we occupy. The feature was about the recent opening of the Flight 23 Store – a joint venture between Jordan Brand and Footaction – and how it is a sign of how powerful the Air Jordan mythos remains even though Michael Jordan himself hasn’t played a real basketball game since 1998 2003.
The piece then dives into the history of Jordan Brand and how it came to be. It’s nothing a sneakerhead hasn’t already heard about at this point (Jordan was going to sign with adidas as a rookie, Nike was going to discontinue making Air Jordans after MJ retired the first time, etc.), but where it got interesting at least for me was towards the end when Post reporter Reed Tucker interviewed some kids who were at the Flight 23 store. This was how Tucker ended his piece before talking to the kids:
Most of the customers were young men in their teens and early 20s, who weren’t even out of diapers when His Airness was at his peak. No matter. Many confessed to liking Air Jordans because they had the most “hype.”
So that naturally piqued my interest; these kids Tucker spoke with admitted basically to being hypebeasts. Or did they?
We have gone to great lengths to talk about the bastardization of the word “hypebeast” and how it went from talking about a single group of people who thirsted for attention to basically encompassing everything that is wrong with sneaker culture. It has gotten to the point where you can’t even express excitement over an upcoming product or post a picture of the kicks that you’re wearing or link to a blog post without being called a hypebeast.
The laissez-faire attitude that most have taken to this is also alarming because many of these same people are the first to say the shoe game is f****d up. So color me confused; do we want it to stay f****d up and underground so it can have this type of coded language that doesn’t welcome new people or do we want to build it up and say that this is a happy place that everybody can join in which in turn leads to sneaker companies to make more stuff for us to love and buy because they see growth?
Anyways, Tucker spoke to these four kids who at first glance might all be considered “hypebeasts” by the low standards set by the internet. But they’re not; there are clear differences between all four and we need to be able to tell the difference for the sake of this sneaker game that should be less f****d up than it is now. So let’s breakdown the key differences between these test subjects…
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Read the rest of Breaking Down The Hypebeast Language (538 words)
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