What’s 100 Years of Sneakers Doing in a Gallery on the Gold Coast? I Went to Find Out.

The new-gallery scent of fresh paint and polished concrete wafts on the refrigerated breeze at the Gold Coast’s Home of the Arts (HOTA). Here, colourful contemporary art splashed across the walls of the recently renovated space is an accessory to the views of cyan lagoons and duplicate blocky white and chrome hotel skyscrapers, palm fronds and jetskis all visible through the ceiling-to-floor windows.

I’m here for HOTA’s first international exhibition, Sneakers Unboxed: Studio to Street, which explores what it calls “one of the most universal design objects”.

The Australian exclusive, first presented by London’s Design Museum, passed through Amsterdam and Seoul to arrive here in the blindingly vacant expanses of Australia’s Miami. 

What do sneakers have to do with the Goldie? The Sunshine State is notorious for many things – beaches, bogans, skin cancer and schoolies – urban street culture exalted in a crisp new gallery is probably somewhere near the bottom of the list.

So why sneakers? Why here? Why now?

It’s always been sneakers. Even though for some the bubble had burst long ago, sneakers are important. Their story spans design, fashion, music, art, capitalism, creativity, style, sports and performance. In a bid to present a fresh, cool and youthful program for HOTA’s revamp as the cultural centre for the Goldie’s creative youth, the clear choice was a giant shoe show. 

In a vast plywood and cement space, 200 shoes and an overwhelming archive of film, photography, art, and product engineering occupy an entire floor of HOTA. 

The sneakers range from optimistically experimental to hotly iconic. For curator Ligaya Salazar, the task of distilling decades of shoes into one insightful collection was “really difficult, because there are so many stories”. 

Add to that the fact that few sneakers, “notoriously unstable products”, survive over 20 years, and the undertaking becomes even more gargantuan. 

“I think there are some stories that are just essential, in terms of the history of sneakers. But then I think the way in which I structured the exhibition can help shape it as well,” Salazar told VICE. 

For Salazar, you can’t talk about sneakers without talking about kids.

The exhibition places emphasis on youth culture and the crucial impact of customisation and scarcity; a fateful environment that led to sneakers’ underground boom before brands even caught a clue. 

“The most important thing was for people to understand that sneakers, the importance of sneakers now, the ubiquitousness of sneakers now, exists really because young people took it and made it their own thing,” she said.

And the story of the sneaker is a human one. At Sneakers Unboxed, you can see a 100-year-old-pair of crusty Chuck Taylors, a dusty pair of rare green and gold Nike Prestos made for athletes competing in the Sydney 2000 Olympics, a pair of Kikos outside of their natural habitat in Fitzroy, or an original pair of Jordans acquired from a justifiably covetous collector out in Perth. You can assess the significance of the Air Max BW to the genesis of the Netherlands’ Gabber scene or appreciate Sacai and Comme des Garcons’ legendary influence on the hype model we know and loathe today. 

HOTA, formerly The Arts Centre Gold Coast, has itself been a site of neverending redevelopment in the egalitarian pursuit of curating a cultural centre since the 1960s. 

The multi-purpose precinct underwent a rebrand in 2018, and the result is a sprawling playground for the artistically inclined including an outdoor super stage, a sculpture walk, a gallery and a chic restaurant overlooking the city’s lush Evandale Lake. 

The exhibit felt like a homecoming to Melbourne’s Scienceworks 20 years on. My adult eyes moved frantically across multiple screens stationed above multiple infographics, showing brightly animated videos on the environmental impact of sneaker production, the invention of air; the advent of mass-production. There was a video on Run DMC’s historic Adidas collaboration, others on B-Boys and B-Girls and Air Jordans. Other walls showcased film photos of kids in New York subways and boroughs dressed to the nines, berets matching the laces in their customised kicks.

Two paintings dominate my favourite corner, their subjects peering flatly from muted earthen landscapes. In the top frame, UK Grime legend Skepta sits astride a white horse. Donning a white tracksuit and a pair of white TNs, he is staunch, carrying a British flag that wafts in a breeze. In the bottom painting, fellow UK grime artist Jme stands on a hoverboard. In one hand he holds a Rubix cube. The other hand steers two horses with Xbox controllers.

The section, championing the significance of Nike’s Air Max series to UK Grime culture, includes a glass box holding a pair of Hyper Blue TNs, Nike and Skepta’s 2017 iridescent Air Max 97 Ultras, a pair of silver bullet 97s, and a quintessentially ugly pair of 2020 Air Max 95s.

The “style” section of the exhibit explored the adoption of sneakers by kids from diverse inner-city neighbourhoods, as through the intersections of music, breakdancing, and fashion, the sneaker was elevated from its intended use as sports equipment to the cultural signifier that it has become known for. 

And it was years before sneaker brands caught on to the hype culture backing their products. Back then, they were focused on innovation. They made products for athletes, not trends.

This is encapsulated in the Adidas-Run DMC story. In 1996, an Adidas brand manager attended a Run DMC show, heard “My Adidas” live, witnessed a bunch of kids lifting their shoes in the air, ran back to the office, and set up a collaboration. It exploded Adidas’ soft power and set the tone for a wave of collabs to come. 

The moment set a precedent for marketing that persists today and is a story that’s reiterated throughout the exhibition. A subculture, public figure, or movement takes the product and makes it their own, eventually the brand catches on, a collaboration is released, and a moment is made.

As someone with an interest in sneaker culture, especially in Melbourne, this pattern has appeared to cannibalise itself. The industry is awash with collaborations. Old underground favourites like TNs and 97s have had incessant reissues over the past ten years, with the quality getting exponentially worse. In 2014, all of a sudden everyone was wearing TNs. The bubble burst, and with it, their heft as cultural signifiers evaporated. 

“It started just becoming bigger and bigger,” Salazar said. “The sports companies started realising that collaborations were a great model to create hype. It just became its own worst enemy, in some ways. Even when I was curating the show, in 2020, and everyone was under lockdown, companies just kept bringing out collaboration after collaboration after collaboration… It’s just like, when is this gonna stop?”

This cynical self-awareness from multi-billion dollar companies happened incredibly fast. In 2008, Salazar was curating an exhibit for the V&A in London on the relationship between performance wear and fashion. Nike refused to be a part of it, at the time saying they made sportswear, not fashion.

“They were like, well, ‘we're not a fashion company’,” Salazar said. “So I actually sourced all of the Nike products from other people. They didn't buy into it, at that point, actually, maybe with the exception of Adidas, none of the big companies did.”

“This time around, they all wanted to be involved, so it's really changed, there’s been an attitude change towards understanding themselves as a company that's more than just sportswear.”

The global sneaker industry is worth $75 billion USD a year. Footwear brands know how to make money, they know what people will buy. They are extending their tendrils into all aspects of culture, and the quality is paying the price. 

Some data projects the sneaker industry is due to hit $100 billion by 2028. They aren’t going anywhere.

“I just don't know how it can keep up,” Salazar said. “Someone else asked me how I would make a selection of the more recent times, because there's so much. And it's really hard to understand what will retain value, what's important, because things work very differently. Now, it's all online. And whether it's gone to shit, I don't know. But I definitely feel like it's going to change soon.”

VICE attended Sneakers Unboxed: From Studio to Street as a guest of HOTA.

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