The Brief History of Customs

For my first post, I decided to talk about the history of customizing sneakers. Also, the picture I posted above is a picture of one of my all time favorite customs on a pair of Air Jordan 11's.

So, from what I have gathered, there is really no documented history on customizing sneakers or from where and how it happened. However, it my belief that this came about through hip hop culture, bear in mind that this is just speculative. So, in the 1970's hip hop was just starting to appear in the ghettos of NYC. And as time progressed, it reached out further and soon spread out across the country. This spread of hip hop was brought on by one of the most iconic names in the genre "RUN-DMC". But it is worth noting that there weren't helping spread a genre, but rather an entire culture.A culture that affected your self expression, your mentality, and even also how you dress. What is interesting about this is that RUN-DMC was notorious for wearing white shell toe Adidas with no laces. This is important because it shows already in this culture of hip hop, that what you wear on your feet should be taken notice of. It also showed that doing something different with how or what you wear was another outlet for self expression. So as hip hop grew, so did this other sub-culture that was obsessed with sneakers and what was on their feet. And as it continued to expand, I feel,so did the cry for individuality, and that is where the job of the sneaker customizer takes place. The ability to alter your shoes to whatever color or design you want by painting it or adding new things to it allowed for this culture to explode to wear it is today, where its members are called "sneakerheads"

This is what I believe is the history of customizing sneakers and also the history of the sneaker culture as whole. But I encourage you to look into hip hop history also, as it is very interesting and is responsible for many aspects of entertainment popular today.