We cannot cross the $1,000 sneaker red line

Wack ones, cool ones & transgressions against morality and swag

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— Jonah & Erin

When you hear the phrase “$1,000 sneakers,” where does your mind go?

My mind goes to some dark places… to pitiable sneakerhead fiends so lost in the sauce they drive up the resale value on rare JJJJounds and CPFM Nikes and confuse this with “having a passion”… to mockable deep-pocketed doofuses who love shopping at airports. When I think about $1,000 sneakers, I shake my d*mn head and feel my stomach turn a little.

Because the tacit understanding for most of human history — among normal people and Mach 3+ clothes appreciators alike — has been that a $1,000 sneaker is a definitionally wack contradiction in terms, i.e. no piece of industrially produced leisure-oriented footwear could ever be worth that much. The “$1,000 sneaker” is a perfect metonym for the most swag-deficient shopping pathologies. A physical encapsulation of “moving goofy,” to be avoided like radioactive fallout.

But we are living through a topsy-turvy, cursed ‘n’ cuckoo End Times-style era, marked by grotesque decadence and itchy fatalism. If you occupy the right class position — or, more accurately, if you’re a couple rungs below the right class position, just close enough to graze its heels if you stretch your fingertips — you can buy a $20 cup of coffee at La Cabra, a $14 bottle of water from Erewhon or, hell, why not, a pair of “luxury” sneakers.

These kinds of splurges might have something in common with, say, costly artisan goods. I’m thinking of, e.g., very expensive Japanese fruits, $20 Seka-ichi apples, $5,000 Bijin-hime strawberries: These prices at least ostensibly reflect extreme scarcity and labor-intensive cultivation. But they also illustrate how lots of people will want to try something simply because it is expensive, classic Veblen Goods style. An outlandish pricetag can function as a kind of P.R. stunt — building buzz for the product in question and, more generally, building buzz for the very idea of paying too much for something. There’s a certain kind of ludicrously high price tag, in other words, that does P.R. for inflation.

This is a highly inflationary moment when it comes to the garment business, where we’ve seen a sudden and severe acceleration in prices over the past few years, to the point that clothes now seem either criminally cheap or nauseatingly expensive, with the middle having fallen out of the market much the same way it’s fallen out of the economy. This acceleration still registers to us here in late 2024 as dumb / aberrant — but it’s reasonable to wonder whether a process of normalization is underway, and whether, before too long, what reads as nauseating today will come to feel natural.

This is all on my mind not just because I help write the No. 1 source across all media for Unbeatable Consumer-Brain-Rot Analysis, but also for more pressing, if anecdotal reasons. In last Thursday’s sletter, we passingly mentioned two buzzed-about sneakers that both cost $1,000+. One of them was unjustifiably expensive and unmistakably wack — familiar territory. But the other was more vexing: unjustifiably expensive yet … undeniably ill.

And in the time since, yet another ~$1k sneaker has dropped, from one of our favorite labels, that is unjustifiably expensive and yet also — Gaia help us — extremely good.

What is the universe telling us?

Let’s start with the buzzed-about wack pair: Loro Piana’s putatively ultraluxe version of the New Balance 990 v6, which come out today.

Now, I’ve encountered wealthy people over the years of the kind whose parents own homes in Brentwood and pied-à-terres in the Village and the 16eme, who went to august East Coast boarding schools and have been wearing hand-me-down Loro Piana since back when no one else knew about it besides other people like them.

But over the past few years — thanks to a concerted marketing push post-LVMH acquisition and post-Succession — Loro Piana has ceased to function as an old-money shibboleth and become very publicly fused, instead, with naked arriviste corniness. Nothing “stealth” about it.

The Loro 990s reportedly incorporate some rare wool in some unclear way and are otherwise nubuck and mesh. They cost $1500 a pair, in a run of 1,000 — a fully-untethered-from-material-reality price point that:

1) serves to safeguard Loro Piana’s cachet, rather than flooding the market with a “democratized” product and diluting the brand value too much,

2) underscores that this release is a thirsty bid for attention all the same, and that these sneakers are substantially “about” their own hideous pricetags, sort of like how a Koons or Hirst sculpture is substantially “about” its own hideous market value at this point, except these shoes are even less imaginative and even more cynical than anything those dudes have come up with!

In other words, the Loro NBs are textbook mark bait. Spyfriend Emily Sundberg from Feed Me emailed asking for my thoughts about these shoes the other day, and this is how I replied:

Afterward, I heard from a tasteful and no-bulls**t Spyfriend who didn’t care about the sneakers but asked if I really thought the $6,000 Prada barn jackets were “beautiful,” because to her they are unambiguously cursed, too.

Which, fair enough. A more apt comparison might have been the Miu Miu New Balance 530 SLs, which we also happened to mention in last Thursday’s Spyplane: Another buzzed-about $1,000+ MSRP designer NB collaboration that at least had the virtue of looking very cool and like someone spent more than ~15 disdainful minutes thinking about it.

Which brings us to the newly dropped extremely good ~$1k sneakers whose appeal we can’t deny, and which got our wheels spinning about Where All This Is Heading — even though we’d consider it a transgression against morality and swag to pay that much for sneakers: