Being fifteen is a great age. When you’re fifteen, you’re basically allowed to do whatever the fuck you want (except for fun stuff like binge drinking) and get away with it. Fucking your best friends girlfriend, smoking weed during study breaks, skipping class for skateboarding? No worries, nobody truly cares (except your parents, but what the fuck do they know, right?). When we were fifteen, for example, we wore sneakers that looked like someone drove a lawnmower through the carpet section of The Home Depot and sewed the shreds together afterwards. Always catering to our need for the most outrageously designed kicks at the time was Nike, which had just stirred up the skateboarding industry with its SB Dunks. When Nike entered the skateboarding market in 2002, they cleverly used the Dunk – originally a basketball shoe which had always been a favorite model among skateboarders – as a canvas for color testing and collaborations. With an unprecedented level of creativity and a limited release strategy, Nike had people going fucking apeshit for any Nike SB Dunk.
Seriously, sneaker heads were flocking in masses to those skate shops that were eligible to sell Nike SB; some models, like the infamous NYC-inspired Pigeon Dunk, even caused riots that had to be broken up by the police. Other models like the Tiffany, for instance, were so incredibly sought-after that they achieved four-digit resale values. Back in the early to mid noughties, wearing Nike SB Dunks made you the coolest kid on your street. And since we were about fifteen, nobody cared that some of them were made of fucking fake fur (Medicom Bearbrick Dunks) or inspired by horror film characters (Freddy Krueger Dunk). At that age, you can get away with that.
Which is not to say that we don’t love the old SB Dunks anymore, because we do. They were great to skate in, after all (remember: Nike SB was a skateboarding brand, so that’s kinda important). And now, it’s the SB Dunk’s fifteenth anniversary. Thus, we recommend you refresh your knowledge of skateboarding history, which the Nike SB Dunk undoubtedly plays a major part in. Not only did it single-handedly change the entire sneaker game and somehow made it socially acceptable to camp out in front of shops for days on end just to cop a pair of rubber-soled shoes (we’re looking at you, Yeezy folks), but it also transformed skateboarding itself. The Dunk SB helped increase Nike’s credibility in the skateboarding world, allowing for its continued support for the industry. Today, Nike SB is pushing skate shoe technology to unknown levels – take the Hyperfeel technology, for example – and is helping skateboarding to grow. In retrospective, this development was made possible by the sheer lunacy of the SB Dunks.
