How Celebrities Affect Sneaker Culture & Media
Years ago, there was a website called Dress Like Kanye West. It was run by a guy who actually ended up working at Complex, who now works at Adidas—a very smart guy. But these kinds of sites were popping up because Kanye’s influence at the time was so crazy that everybody wanted to know what he was wearing.
Now, Upscale Hype is a website that’s basically devoted to breaking down people’s outfits. Now Complex does a lot of this kind of thing. When these brands started doing it, that’s around the time we started seeing the shift in people wanting to act cool and act like they don’t pay attention to what celebrities are wearing. But it isn’t true. Everybody pays attention.
Back then, Kanye was at the forefront of having a whole website devoted to what he was wearing, breaking down his outfit. If he was overseas, and he wore some obscure new clothes, people were trying to find out what they were. In a way, this paved the way for how sneaker culture has developed since then.
Whether it’s on Instagram or another social media medium, it’s about being first to post that a certain person was wearing these sneakers. Or that this person just debuted these. Or LeBron James just wore these. And now you can even see it through the tunnels in NBA and NFL games. There is such an appetite now for big stars and athletes to walk through the tunnel and see what they’re wearing, and then it immediately goes online.
And these aren’t even just sneaker blogs that are posting this stuff. It’s also sports blogs posting it. These days, you get the sense that everyone knows that the cameras are watching. Everyone is taking a more deliberate approach to fashion and being seen, and brands are working with celebrities and athletes to make sure that the debut of a shoe that everyone’s waiting for is spectacular and happens in the biggest way possible.
In the past, there wasn’t as much content to see what celebrities were wearing, especially on their feet, and not broken down the way it is now. And because that has changed, everything has changed. I know that at Complex, for example, everyone is always rushing when someone debuts something new to get a post up on Instagram because it helps to build the hype machine and help build up steam for those releases.
These newer things like the celebrity co-signs, celebrities being photographed all the time, and celebrities deliberately working with brands to debut sneakers for big events have really changed sneaker media and the way that it operates.
To learn more about how the sneaker industry and media are evolving and growing, consider exploring the world of online sneaker education. If you’ve been looking for an affordable and accessible means to achieve a sneaker education, it can serve as an amazing option.
