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Inside Hanif Abdurraqib’s Sneaker Collection
The bestselling poet and essayist – and avid sneaker collector – believes his rare Nikes were made to be worn.
H eartbreak is the distance between what can be carried and what must be left behind. If you have ever stood, two or three boxes in your arms while a host of others are strewn along the sidewalk outside of a home or an apartment you were evicted from, you might understand this. Jarring as it may be to find yourself suddenly without the stability of housing or, in my case in 2005, nowhere to go, it provides a clash of intersecting realities. One of the primary ones, for me, was that I simply could not take everything. I had no car. I had no help. I was walking to stash what I could in a storage unit and leaving the rest, knowing it would be stolen or picked through the minute I turned my back. And so I took necessities. Documents, enough clothes to get by. I left the box of sneakers, the Clerks Pack edition of the Air Max 180 that I’d coveted and purchased just months ago peeking up, out of the box, the pink rose-colored Nike check drowning in all else that had to be left behind.
I know sneaker enthusiasts who collect pairs as a sort of corrective. A sort of revenge, acting against past misdeeds, or losses, or moments of unattainability. I couldn’t afford the pair I admired when I was broke or my family was broke, and now I purchase them as a corrective. I understand the psychology behind the impulse, but I found that approach of sneaker consumption and acquisition to be less interesting to me than what I have landed on as I’ve gotten older, and as my collection has sprawled into an entire room of its own.
I am obsessed with histories, perhaps especially how the material object intersects with the individual emotional landscape. I don’t pull on a pair from 2001 so that I can feel like I did as a high schooler; I do it because there is a version of myself that loved that pair once, and that version has not yet escaped me. That version of myself is still present. I am satisfying a part of my history that informs my living in the current day, and if a pair of sneakers is a bridge to that satisfaction, I will take it. This folds into a larger ethos that embodies my living, my writing, the way I walk through the world: I am grateful to every version of myself for having survived, so that I can have this version, and whatever versions come after.
“It is wise to not make a God of anything that can crumble in your hands.”
For this reason, I wear all of my pairs, and if I don’t wear them, I pass them on. It is wise to not make a God of anything that can crumble in your hands. I love when a pair begins to signal to me that it doesn’t have much left to give. It’s somewhat romantic, a pair beginning to crack, or the slight stickiness at the bottom of a shoe when you take a step. A stickiness that is, of course, the sole of the shoe flirting with the earth, a peeling away that is gradual and then sudden. I remember the moments of loss, fondly.
A pair of Jordan 5 Motorsport PEs, leaving a small bit of Carolina blue residue on the blacktop at a farmer’s market. The Air Max 1 Supreme Animal Pack, cracking gently at first and then immediately and urgently crumbling while I was on stage at a show, causing me to gingerly tiptoe back to my hotel room afterwards. And yes, the Air Max 180 Clerks Pack, just last year. The piece encasing the rose-pink Nike check cracked in half first, almost a warning. And then there began to be smaller cracks along the sole. I decided to measure my wearing of them, I’d guessed they had three, maybe four wears left. But then, on my next wear of them, I barely made it out of the house before they were finished. And even that is a sort of sweetness, to have loved any item to dust. The ending, satisfactory or not, happens beyond your control, at a time you don’t determine, which is not unlike what it is to love anyone or anything.
“These are items meant to touch the earth, meant to conduct a chorus of squeaks and shouts along a basketball court.”
I have pairs that are as old as I am, one that is older than me. I have a black-toe Jordan 1 from 1984, one of the earliest pairs ever created. I played basketball in them once last year (never again, given the age of both the sneaker and the age of my knees). I am the type to have an original pair, and then a newer retro, for safer wearing (for example, I have every iteration and release of the cool-grey Jordan 11). I’m meticulous about this in the way that I am meticulous about any history, especially as someone who grew up loving sneakers, who stood in line for pairs as a teenager, after mowing lawns or cleaning houses, or doing whatever it took to scrape some cash together.
But I wear them all, and I wear them always, and I tell other sneaker collectors to get out of the mode of just accumulating to accumulate. These are items meant to touch the earth, meant to conduct a chorus of squeaks and shouts along a basketball court, meant to scrape along the top of skateboards, meant to step in a puddle or have something spilled on them at a concert. In short, they are meant to live a life alongside us, the people who pull them on. The central lesson that I took in 2005, walking away from a box of sneakers that I had carefully picked out and made a small collection out of, is that you can’t take any of this with you. You will, at some point, have to cross some threshold – earthly or not – where you will have to leave your material treasures behind. In the meantime, if we must march slowly towards whatever inevitabilities await, let us march in the pairs we love, until they are done with us, and then we’ll put on another.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s Sneaker Collection
