Sneakers and Interactive Media Culture

ESPN is running now sneaker culture programs on it’s site as well as on-air. All summer on ESPN2, it’s running the program, “It’s the Shoes” hosted by Bobbito Garcia. It’s the Shoes will visit the sneaker collections of Allen Iverson, Nelly, Michael Vick and others throughout the summer. The show airs as part of ESPN2’s “Block Party” each Tuesday night (Wednesday morning) at 1:30 a.m.

Also, Page 2 on ESPN.com is running a campaign to find the greatest sneaker of all time. Page 2’s panel of sneaker freaks selected 48 classic athletic shoes and seeded three regions: the Old School Hoops Region, New School Hoops Region, and Non-Hoops Region. Visitors to the site are invited to place their votes.

Place your vote now.

Krumping mixes a frenetic style of dancing with clown-derived make-up and a theatricality that blends pantomime and performance art. It’s telling that this new hip-hop-related art form was conceived and popularized in Hollywood’s backyard, and yet only a few mass media outlets have reported on this phenomenon — until now. David LaChapelle’s hyperkinetic documentary, Rize, examines this extraordinary new dance scene, depicting not only its popularity in South Central LA, but also the ways that it has changed the lives of the district’s denizens.

Check out the site.

R/GA, the New York-based interactive advertising agency, today announced NikeiD.com won a silver award in the Digital Media category at the 25th Annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), one of the world’s most prestigious design competitions. Co-sponsored by BusinessWeek and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the competition honored last year’s iteration of NikeiD.com, which was relaunched in March 2005. NikeiD.com empowers consumers with freedom of expression, allowing them to custom-design, personalize and purchase footwear and gear. R/GA worked closely with Nike to implement breakthrough uses for the Flash platform, producing a site that dispels the myths of incompatibility between Flash and commerce. A major part of this development was creating an innovative four-step build process that was fast and intuitive, while encouraging users to play with multiple designs. This fun experience was augmented with features for consumers to store favorite designs in personal “lockers” and share feedback with friends via email.

Read the BusinessWeek writeup.

Read more.

Brooklyn based blogger, Set Speed, was kind enough to forward over this article from this past Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine. Eventhough, Nike’s new NIKEiD.com advertising campaign seems to have reached critical mass across the media waves the last few weeks, this article gives some nice insight into the ‘influencer-centric’ design studio that they have set up at the 255 Elizabeth space in NYC. Give it a read.

[from NYTimes Magazine]
By HORACIO SILVA

A store is born in New York about as often as a Broadway hopeful arrives at the Port Authority. These days, however, jaded consumers expect more boogie-woogie than the retail equivalent of a matinee for the blue-rinse set. Temporary guerrilla stores, traveling boutiques and hybrid emporiums, selling everything from Belgian fashion experimentalia to limited-edition Japanese toys, are just some of the novelties setting the stage for a serious denouement at the cash register.

So it should surprise exactly no one that the fad for members-only clubs now extends into the shopping arena. In the wake of exclusionary stores like Celux, the LVMH-owned retail club in Tokyo, Nike has opened the NIKE iD lab, a private design studio on Elizabeth Street complete with security guards to keep out the celebrity seekers and sneaker freakers who memorize bar codes and shrink-wrap their shoes for safekeeping.

Read more.