Earlier this year, photographer Mordechai “Mister Mort” Rubinstein released the book Dead Style: A Long Strange Trip Into the Magical World of Tie-Dye, immortalizing the drippy style of latter-day fans at Dead & Co. Dead T-shirts-both authentic merch and the lovingly homemade tees that fans swapped outside concerts-have become desirable again, fetching thousands on sites like Ebay and Etsy. Tie-dye is the ever-present motif of the moment appearing everywhere from a $2,795 Altuzarra dress to $8 Gap socks. The fashion point is prescient as the loose style of Deadheads has become a potent influence on today’s clothing. “You had the aging hippies and then you had the young people that were being introduced to it-either through the music or through John Mayer or through fashion.” Recently, Erik Burbank, the chief brand officer of Keen, an outdoorsy shoe label in Portland, Ore., attended a Dead & Company show with his sons. On StockX, Croc sales are growing 8x faster than the overall sneaker marketīut at the same time, the Dead has already found a foothold with a younger generation, thanks in large part to Dead & Company, a revitalized version of the band with guitarist John Mayer occupying Garcia’s sizable shoes. Currently, of all the shoes released in 2020 that resell on StockX, the ten with the highest price premiums (the average resale price compared to the retail price) are SB Dunks. At StockX, a popular sneaker resale website, prices for SB Dunks have more than tripled in the past three years, hitting a high of over $730 on average this July. There have been a slew of officially licensed Grateful Dead shoes before-there was even a prior Dead Croc issued for the band’s 50th anniversary in 2015-but we’re nearing peak footwear fanaticism here in 2020, and particularly around both Nike Dunks and Crocs. If a shoe collaboration “touches one in every five and influences them to understand more about the music, then we’ve done our job,” says Kram. The hope is that even seeing the Dunks might turn some sneaker fans onto the music. “Part of the way to keep the music in perpetuity is by touching the younger generation and right now the younger generation speaks through product,” says Alix Kram, the VP and head of global retail and brand licensing at Warner Music Artist Services, which holds the Grateful Dead license and who worked with Nike and Chinatown Market on the launches. It has been 55 years since the Dead first took to the stage in Northern California, and this one-two punch of florid footwear is an attempt to make sure the music never stops. The limited-issue pairs now trade for thousands of dollars on sneaker resale sites. SB (skateboarding) Dunk sneakers-in green, orange and yellow to mimic the band’s jaunty dancing bear icons-which were released in July. That honor goes to the trio of faux-fur-coated But, these psyched-out Crocs were not even the most hyped-up Grateful Dead shoes of the past few months.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |