by Eddie Huang
“Yo, y’all collect kicks?”
“Yeah, we just got these Finish Lines! Where’d you get those Send Helps, though?”
“I been had them. I got all the SBs, Air Max, Jordans, etc., before they come out.”
“Word? Let me find out.”
“No homo, I live around the corner if you wanna peep it. Everything is legit. I got receipts from the store and everything.”
“No doubt!”
The two kids were Matt and Patrick. They were both from Baruch and had been collecting sneakers for a minute. Neither of them copped that day, but the next week I got a call.
“Yo, is Eddie there?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Son, it’s Patrick and Matt. We had the Finish Lines last week.”
“Yeah, I remember you, wassup?”
“We got a order for like twenty sneakers, man, can we come pick up? We got the sizes and everything. All our homies wanna cop.”
“Cool, cool, just you two, though. I don’t want everyone comin’ up in my crib.”
“No doubt, my boy Steve wants to come help us carry them, though.
Is that cool?”
I still remember the day this dude Steve rolled in. Kid was wearing a Clientele Beanie, Gucci glasses, a Bluetooth, and mad fuckin’ cherry ChapStick like he was drinking Kool-Aid and dillz the night before. He was Cantonese, too.
“Son, what kind of style you tryin’ to proliferate here, b? You like part cabdriver with the Bluetooth, library with the glasses, you skiin’ with the hat, and Hunts Point with the ChapStick. What’s really good?”
“Huh, huh, ha, ha, stop playin’, man.”
Steve had a laugh on five-second delay and didn’t care that I clowned him for ten minutes. He just loved sneakers. I kept telling jokes about him to Matt/Patrick and he went through the apartment checking the sneakers to make sure they weren’t counterfeit. He was about his business. He’d stop every few minutes to shake his head and laugh, but get right back to the shoes. I kept snappin’ on Steve ’cause he had a good sense of humor.
After ten minutes, he says to me: “Yo, are you going to Soled Out this weekend?”
“What the fuck is Soled Out, some cabdriver convention?”
“Naw, asshole, it’s a sneaker show this Saturday. My boy Manny runs it, I can get you a table.”
“I’m not tryin to go to a sneaker battle, man.”
“You would cake though, son. No one is going to have these kicks there. Mork and Mindy haven’t even dropped yet and you got twelve pairs.”
“Nahhh, I’m good. I’ma just sell these on Craigslist.”
That Saturday morning, I get a phone call at 8 A.M. from Jae.
“Yellow fever, wake up!”
“Darkness, stop playin’, it’s eight A.M., son.”
“Yo, I told you I was pickin’ you up at nine for Soled Out!”
“Naw, man, I told you I wasn’t going to that shit. It’s a bunch of twelve-year-old Asians and Dominicans walking around with sneakers on their necks.”
“Yellow fever, don’t make me run up in your crib and drag your fat ass out.”
“Man, I’m five seven and one-sixty, ain’t nothin’ fat about that. You just skinny ’cause ninjas be eatin’ your food on the court, ha, ha.”
I hung up the phone and went back to sleep. Thirty minutes later, I heard someone just laying on the horn downstairs. It was Jae in his car so I let him upstairs.
“Goddamn man, why I gotta go to this shit! You got your own sneakers.”
“ ’Cause, you fucking Chinaman. I know that if you don’t move these kicks, you gonna borrow money from me and I AM NOT HOLDIN’ YOU DOWN THIS TIME!”
“Fine, fine, fine …”
That was my problem. I loved sneakers, but I hated hypebeasts. Full disclosure, I did cop the Incredible Hulk Bapes and rocked them with a lime-green sweater and purple shirt so I got caught wide open … once. I was good at getting all the sneakers, but I was lazy moving them because I didn’t like dealing with hypebeasts.
We got to Soled Out in Soho and it was a shit show. People in line had pairs of sneakers tied by the laces hanging from their necks. Others were holding sneakers in the air, some cats came out wearing every piece of streetwear they owned, and there were twelve-year-old kids being chaperoned by parents at the event. It gave me mental diarrhea, but I laughed a little inside because it reminded me of the time my dad took me to get Penny’s autograph at Macy’s when the Magic drafted him. Ahhhh, life why u such a contradiction, b?
“Yo, Eddie!”
“Oh, wassup? Steve, right?”
“Yeah! I thought you weren’t coming.”
“Yeaaah, Darkness made me come.”
“Ha, ha, stop frontin’, man, you love this shit. You can’t act like you don’t want to see all these kicks.”
“Naw, I like the sneakers, but it’s mad bugged out! Son, are you selling laces?”
“Don’t start, man! I got sneakers, too. You see these Air Max 90 Homegrowns! They’re going for like five hundred a pair.”
“Ahhh, my man’s selling laces! You got packs of laces, man, that is the most bullshit hustle ever.”
That day at Soled Out, Steve helped me man the table and we sold over twenty-eight pairs of shoes. I tried to hit him off, but he wouldn’t take any money. He said it was even ’cause he used the table to sell laces, too, but son didn’t even make a hundred dollars on laces, so I took him to eat food in Chinatown at Shanghai Cuisine. He lived down the street on Mulberry and Bayard.
He was Cantonese so he didn’t eat Shanghainese food all that much. My favorite dish in the joint was the yellow river eels stir-fried with Chinese chives and white pepper. One of the most simple dishes, but the best over rice. You get the gas flavor of the wok on the little eels, aromatic sweetness from the chives, rice wine, and the specks of white pepper to set it off. Steve had never had it before, but he fucked with it. We got some panfried buns: sin jian bao, xiao long bao, and lion’s head meatballs. It was way too much food for two people, but cash had a habit of burning fucking holes in pockets so there it went.
We got to talking and Steve started asking me how I got my sneakers, how the business worked, etc. I was a little suspicious so I didn’t reveal too much. Jae taught me how to hustle because he’d already known me for a year and knew I was 100. Steve was definitely a straight-up dude, but you know the kid is cautious. I could see potential, though. Steve loved sneakers, knew hypebeasts, and was good with money. The whole day we sold sneakers, I would always rely on my memory and figure out how much I made by remembering what I brought, what was left, and then see if it matched up with my money. It wasn’t efficient, but I was just quick. Steve wrote down everything we sold, the price, the person’s email/contact info, and tracked it on a notepad. I didn’t want to close the door on him before I gave him a chance to show and prove. At the crib, I still had six pairs of Mork and Mindy SBs so I told Steve:
“A’ight, why don’t we go dutch on these six. I got them so you give me half the bread for them and sell ’em. My job is to get the kicks, your job is to sell ’EM. We both put up half and split the profits.”
“Word is bond!”
Steve has been my best friend ever since. I got money with him, ate with him, broke bread with him, and I hollered at girls with him. He was my twin. Steve spoke Cantonese, I spoke Mandarin, but we had the same values, similar family stories, and eventually we both lived in Chinatown. For a while, I stopped going to law school and just hustled with Steve every day. Anything I needed, he had my back and never asked questions. I remember Steve loved Mobb Deep and always quoted Shook Ones, “Watch my fronts, I got your back.” Like Zabb Judah said about Don King, “That man is my sunshine.”
That winter I was visiting my uncle for his sixtieth birthday in Phoenix when I walked by a newsstand. Out front was Newsweek magazine with a light-skinned brother on the cover and the caption “The Race Is On.” I didn’t know who Obama was so I picked up the magazine a
nd read through it. He seemed like a cool dude, young, and quoted Hov. I went home on the Internet and saw his speech at the DNC. He was a little more moderate than I liked, but he actually had the balls to oppose the war in Iraq, talked about how we needed an energy revolution, and understood how to communicate with people in the new millennium. He was interesting to me, but I wasn’t sold yet.
As a kid born on March 1, 1982, I grew up in the excess of the Brat Pack–Madonna–Joe Montana–Michael Jackson eighties and the NWA–MJ–Nirvana–World Wide Web nineties, and we saw the residual battles from seminal cases like Roe v. Wade or Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The issues I remember were global warming, gun control, music file sharing, cocaine versus crack sentencing guidelines, C. Delores Tucker versus Hip-Hop, affirmative action, abortion, and United States v. Microsoft. Besides the Rodney King incident and the 1992 L.A. riots, there really wasn’t anything that warranted stopping the Knicks’ game besides O.J. That is, until 9/11.
I remember that day. I was sitting in a chair waiting for social problems class to start. The professor was late and none of us knew what was going on. We didn’t have smartphones yet and I didn’t text. We looked out the window and some classes were letting out randomly. People would walk up to the window screaming, “They took down the towers!” Before we could follow up, they were running down the street. People didn’t know what to do so we turned on the TV and there it was, over and over.
People reacted with hate and fear and then community by wearing American flag shirts, bandannas, crying, huddling, lost, and senseless. They packed the gymnasium to talk about how they felt. A lot of students were from New York so I understood their pain. For them, it was personal. But for me, it was surreal. I didn’t take it personally: I’d never subscribed to America. I never felt included in this country. To this day, someone tells me to go back to China at least three times a year and I live in downtown New York.
Americans. Americans. AMERICANS. They’ve called me chink. They’ve treated me like the Other. They laughed at my food, they laughed at my family, they laughed at my culture, they wouldn’t give me a proper interview because of my face. Americans. They did that. When 9/11 happened, I was an observer. I mourned for the victims and felt for the people as individuals, but this wasn’t my fight. It wasn’t the victims’ fight, either, though. They were caught in the middle as always. The little people suffer for the crimes of few. This fight wasn’t between the people that flew the planes and the people in the towers. We all got played by politics we had nothing to do with.
In the aftermath of 9/11, if you tuned in to television stations and watched the debates over the war in Iraq, no one had the backbone to point out the obvious. America, Inc. was running out of gas. We’d squeezed everything we could out of the rest of the world with our foreign policy. The answer was not to go into Iraq. It should have been to look at ourselves, look at our own crumbling policies, and economic mishaps. We should have lowered the debt, regulated the banks, prevented the oncoming mortgage crisis, and reevaluated our foreign policy, but we didn’t. We played on the fear of innocent Americans and spent our resources on a nameless, faceless war that tore apart Iraq, emptied our war chest, and left us with an American infrastructure screaming for help. We didn’t look at ourselves until it was too late. We spent our money on an arms race against ourself, fought an unnecessary war, and neglected the problems we had on this side of the water’s edge.
Yet, in the middle of this mess was Obama. Coming out of the darkest period in American politics since the Cuban Missile Crisis, there he was saying the war was wrong. As I read more about Obama and followed his rise, I saw a man that had his own moral compass. He knew what he felt was right and had no problem saying it. For the first time in my life, there was a presidential candidate that I related to on a cultural, political, and personal level. Obama was, is, and will forever be my homeboy.
That day, along with the Newsweek magazine, the new Jordan V Fire Reds dropped in stores. It was the must-have gift of Christmas 2006. Then it hit me: if Obama was going to win, he had to win the youth vote by a landslide. What better way to promote Obama and the youth vote than through streetwear? Additionally, streetwear touched the hood. Usually, the hood didn’t vote. I was a college grad in law school and so was Jae, but we had that ol’ ignant mentality where we didn’t think politics affected us. No one cared about us anyway. Why the fuck would we stand in line to vote without a guarantee that we were getting something out of it? Shit, standing in line for sneakers, you know exactly what’s gonna happen. Nike is gonna take your money and send you home crispy. Deal. Obama was the first dude that we saw and said, “You know what, this dude isn’t gonna fuck me. He gonna do what he said. I trust him.” As much as I like his policies, I have to be honest, that’s all it was for us at the end of the day. He was a face we could trust. And to hypebeasts, skaters, and hip-hop kids, they probably trusted the owners of local shops more than the talking heads on TV. Our shirts became the Street CNN: Cotton News Network.
I got a pair of Fire Red Vs and didn’t cop anything to match because I made my own shirts that Christmas. My idea was to make a T-shirt jersey in the style of Michael Jordan’s rookie jersey from 1986. Red with black and white script “Chicago 08” on the front and “Obama 08” on the back. Ning was studying graphic design so she mocked it up, we sent it to a printer, and started our T-shirt company: Bergdorf Hoodman. I realized that if I wanted to see change in the world, I need to make dollars first. Law school was the last nail in the coffin. The experience left me even more cynical than I came in. Everyone was a crook, but I didn’t see anything wrong with it anymore. I understood. We live in an adversarial world. The economy, our politics, and the judicial system are all adversarial. If you want your voice to be heard, you have to fight. There’s no other way around it. You can’t expect people to seek you out; if you know you’re right and you have the answers, then it’s your duty to tell the world.
Look at Obama. He knew he was right, had a message, and used the channels he had to get it out. Hillary had the big donors, but Obama knew his advantages and played them just like I played Professor O’Sullivan. He made the 2008 presidential race a young man’s game for the first time since Kennedy. I didn’t have money to donate, but I had an idea so I started dropping off T-shirts to places like Union, Elite Boardshop, Palace 5ive, Union LA, and Digital Gravel. At the time, it was still January 2007 and Obama hadn’t even declared his candidacy yet. I was ahead of the curve, but my gut just told me he was going to declare and win. A lot of stores didn’t want to carry Obama shirts because they were political, but I broke it down to them.
“Son, think about it. Who shops here? Have you ever seen a Republican with some Izod shit on in here?”
“No, but mad people still like Hillary!”
“Yeah, people like Hillary, but they aren’t your customers! Black, Asian, Spanish people shop here and your white customers skate. Every single one of the motherfuckers is voting Obama! Think about it. You’re preaching to the choir.”
In March of 2007, I got a call from the biggest supporter Hoodman would ever have: Nima Nabavi. At the time, Nima was the godfather of online streetwear. Before all the other Internet retailers, Nima was doing it right. He went to grad school at NYU and he started Digital Gravel to sell street art, streetwear, music, and basically anything related to hip-hop or street culture in general. He was the only other person I met in streetwear who understood its power beyond a five-year blip on the fashion radar and wanted to use it to promote the things he believed in. He never took ads on his site, he supported artists even if it didn’t make money, and he was blatantly political in the email blasts he sent out to sell product. To this day, a lot of the integrity we have at Baohaus comes from watching the way Nima carried himself and his business.
Nima also carried Obey, Shepherd Fairey’s brand, but even Shepherd wouldn’t make Obama tees until late into Obama’s campaign. I had been doing it since January ’07 bec
ause I wasn’t some pussy that was scared about what people would think of my opinions. I knew Obama was the right dude for the job and I did everything I could to get behind it. That’s the way it should be. Nima bought up every single Obama T-shirt in my apartment after our phone call. The day he put them up, everything sold out in three hours.
Within three months, we had nineteen stores carrying our shirts and I donated 10 percent of each shirt to the campaign. Not 10 percent of profits, straight up 10 percent off the top. No bullshit after proceeds or 1 percent business. I wasn’t making that much money anyway, so the point was to get this motherfucker elected and we did. There were people like me in every neighborhood doing the damn thing for Obeezy. Five dollars here, a hundred dollars there, don’t smoke that this week and donate the dub kid! It was happening everywhere. We all had a part in it and when Obama got elected, I told myself, Today, you’re an American motherfucker.
* Please believe, your boy never stepped foot in a Brooks Brothers, but that’s what people rock.
† I ended up doing all those things. My first year, I volunteered at Jamaica, Queens, family court a few times and second year, I got picked to work at the Innocence Project with Vanessa Potkin, who to this day is probably my favorite attorney.
‡ Tommy’s family still owns Nom Wah Tea Parlor, the oldest dim sum joint in New York. Respect homie.
§ Shapiro was my homie that worked at the Innocence Project with me. We kinda kept to ourselves talking Michigan football and hoops. He used to work at Vibe and reviewed RZA once, so most people in the industry believe it’s Peter he’s talking about on “Nutmeg” when he says “Crazy as Shapiro! Multiply myself ten times standin’ next to zero.”
‖ One of Raekwon’s many aliases.
a The most rare and exclusive Nikes.
15.
HYPEBEASTS
In 2009, I graduated from law school in the midst of a recession that killed streetwear. Kids with disposable income for the latest kicks were thinning out. Before the recession, I assumed I wouldn’t have to take the job as an associate at a law firm, but when the streetwear bubble burst, I had no other option. Ning, Steve, and I continued designing Hoodman, but most of our retailers started closing up shop and there was nowhere to sell our goods. Nima and Digital Gravel remained our biggest supporter, but even he was having trouble once Karmaloop.com co-opted the movement.