John Migdal
ers I loved, and it just started this crazy rabbit
hole of looking for sneakers. I also realized
that Air Max 95s were still so hot. People were
dropping $500 (what seemed to be a crazy
amount at the time) on certain colorways. This
was before every shoe was retroed every three
years, and you never knew if you would ever
see these shoes again. Retros barely existed
then. Even Air Force Ones weren’t coming out
all the time. In the mid 1990s, retro wasn’t cool
yet. When the dunks blew up in 1999, it was
five years later and a totally different landscape.
In the early days of the Internet, Asia exclu-
sives were still hard to get. You could do it,
but it felt like a hunt, and there was a certain
amount of translation and broken English
involved. You’d find a few stores downtown
[New York] that got their hands on a few pairs,
but think about it. When those Jordan retros
came out in 1994, all anyone was thinking
about was the next futuristic shoe to come out.
When the Air Max 95 came out, the world just
wasn’t ready for retro yet.
I know that my eBay account was created in
January 1998, but before that, I was browsing
all these Japanese sites and seeing colorways
that I didn’t know existed because they were
Asia exclusives. Nowadays, nothing is a sur-
prise. You used to see shoes you knew well in
colors that you didn’t know, and you wondered
if they were real or fake.
in “vintage” because it was just a fraction of
what’s on there today. eBay was in its infancy.
We would just go through whatever Nike was
on there. Nobody was even on there yet. It
was all early adopters, so I start searching, and
I’m like, “Oh, there’s some cool stuff that I’ve
never seen before.”
First of all, in the mid-to-late 1990s, anything
with Japanese characters on it was fresh. That’s
when I started buying vintage t-shirts, some
old “Wings” stuff, and I start buying sneakers
that I slept on because before then, if it wasn’t
in a store in your neighborhood, you missed
out. I didn’t start with the vintage collecting,
but slowly but surely, I started making my way
back to it because it started proliferating eBay.
Between the Internet and mp3, that was the
golden age of discovery! I remember then
starting to covet a pair of Air Jordan 1s in
red, white, and black. It became clear that you
could buy a pair of worn Jordan 1s on eBay,
so I bought a few. I’ve been wearing a differ-
ent beat up pair of original Air Jordan 1s since
1999. I see the fade on the blue laces, and it’s
just gorgeous. I just love that shoe. I’m tell-
ing you the blue faded-to-purple laces on the
original “Royals” is one of my favorite things
on the planet.
One of the very first things I bought on eBay
in 1998 was a light blue Expos jersey because
it was so fresh. Back then, you had to buy a
money order, drop it in the mail, and then
wait for them to get it. There was no Paypal. I
would search for the shit that I didn’t have easy
access to, Japanese CDs and things. I distinctly
remember friends coming into my dorm room
just to do Nike searches on eBay. You just
typed in “Nike.” You didn’t even have to type
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