TAP3, the first sneaker drop, comes out on March 21.
Last year, Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF released the “Satan Shoes.” They sold 666 altered pairs of Nike’s Air Max 97s in collaboration with rapper Lil Nas X (everything sold out in one minute). It ended with a lawsuit from Nike, where they eventually agreed on a settlement.
READ ALSO: For The Clout: This Brooklyn Art Collective Is Selling Empty Designer Paper Bags At $40 Each
Now, they’ve launched an official (and legal) sneaker line named MSCHF Sneakers. After the legal battle, MSCHF co-founder Daniel Greenberg said, “[we learned] quite a lot about copyright law, the First Amendment and first-sale doctrine, but at the end of the day it reinforced what we already knew: Get off other people’s platforms.”
The collective will be kicking off their weekly drops with their first style, the TAP3, on March 21.
Unique ideas
After selling parodies of established products (like their Birkinstock sandal modeled after Birkenstocks made of Hermes bags worth $76,000) and tongue and cheek projects (like OnlyBags, where they sold empty branded paper bags for $40), MSCHF plans to continue unique drops through the sneaker line.
“Finding people who were not scared off by the concepts we were pitching wasn’t easy,” Greenberg tells The New York Times. “There’s a ton of global infrastructure that exists to make sneakers, but they’re optimized for things that are much more normal than what we want to make, so talking them through it was very difficult at first.”
Weekly drops
The artist says that rolling out new ideas is the easy part despite the initial challenges. “In some ways, the entire MSCHF Sneakers program is us ensuring we can make whatever we want,” Greenberg continues.
“When thinking of footwear, there are dozens of ideas that we had for years and years that we knew with mods were just not possible. We had to ask ourselves: Did we really want to do all this work for the reward? The clear answer was yes. We have been working silently for almost a year on these.”
Starting March 21, new MSCHF Sneakers drops will be available every Monday at 11 AM EST on their website and mobile app.
Banner photo from @sneakerfreakermag on Instagram.
