“I want to feel like Michael Jordan every day of my life. The former propels the latter: if you look good, you feel good and if you feel good you play good. I’d paint on my cleats before games, and would be talking to my coaches like “yo, can I redesign our jerseys?” They’d be like “dude, get the f*ck out of here and go to class.” I thought our jerseys were really subpar, and that’s when I realized how much aesthetics play into athletics. I had a partial athletic scholarship to Northern Michigan, and studied art, drawing and painting. įast forwarding a bit, I was still painting shoes when I graduated high school and went off to play college football. They were on that 2 for $89.99 deal at Foot Locker, but if my mom didn’t like a shoe I couldn’t get it … and she didn’t like those. One thing I never had was Grant Hill’s FILAs though. I also played a lot of basketball and football growing up, and had shoes from a lot of different brands so I experienced sneaker culture through that lens as well. So as you grew up you were experiencing sneakers through the lenses of art and sport simultaneously?Ībsolutely. Eventually I made a business out of painting T-shirts and shoes, and when I realized I could monetize my art I decided that I wanted to continue pursuing art as a career. That childhood care and attention to detail carried over to my later work.Ī combination of expression and necessity.įacts. I started customizing my shoes out of necessity, because I didn’t want to get teased at school for having dirty shoes. I think that’s why the customs I made as art objects later on in life were a bit more refined than some of the other customs I’d see. All the types of things that customizers would do, I was doing as a kid. I’d do everything from my own colorblocking to spray-painting them gold. Were you painting them other colors, giving them a refresh, a little bit of both? I’d try really hard to keep my white pair clean, and when they started to get a bit dirty I’d paint on them to prolong their lifespan. Outside of sports shoes, those two Forces would be my only pairs for the year. And in Chicago, unlike New York, we wore Air Force 1 Mids too. I’d usually just get two pairs of Air Force 1s at Christmas, a white pair and a black pair. My sister was even named after Jordan! As I got older, my parents would get me shoes less frequently because I had siblings and would grow out of my shoes so fast. I was born in 1991, right in the height of the Chicago Bulls’ first run of championships, and there’s no childhood picture of me that I’m not wearing Jordans in. Ju Working on Projects: I was always immersed in sneaker culture growing up. Tell us what sneaker culture was like there - did everything revolve around Michael Jordan? HYPEBEAST: You grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the ‘90s.
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