Image via Complex Original
There aren’t many Nike collaborators who have the opportunity to do what Union Los Angeles has done in recent years. A familiar partner to the brand, Union has had ties with the Swoosh since the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until 2018’s Air Jordan 1 that a new generation of sneaker enthusiasts started to realize the store’s impact. The chopped-and-screwed Jordan 1s gave Union a new context in today’s hype-driven climate. Ever since, the Chris Gibbs-owned store has been full throttle with its special makeups, dropping a duo of Air Jordan 4s in 2020 and two follow-up Jordan 4 colorways in 2021 for Union’s 30th anniversary. And Gibbs and company aren’t letting up yet.
Next up from Union are three colorways of the Nike Dunk Low in a “Passport Pack” theme inspired by Gibbs’ global hunts for rare sneakers and streetwear during the 2000s. The first of the bunch, a play on the Europe-exclusive Pistachio Dunk High from 2003, releases today exclusively from Union Los Angeles and via a special New York City pop-up. Two more colors will follow in March, and all three retail for $150 apiece.
In a one-on-one with Gibbs ahead of today’s release, he explained how his store’s latest Nike collaboration came to fruition, how it was originally intended to launch last year as part of Union’s 30th anniversary releases, and the “happy mistake” of stumbling onto the Dunk Low’s tearaway ripstop material. The Union owner also hinted at what’s to come later this year including more Air Jordan and Nike projects. The conversation, lightly edited for clarity, appears below.
The Dunk Lows are Union’s first Nike collab in a long time. How was it working with that [Nike Sportswear] division again?
Full transparency, I’m part of the design team for Undefeated as my little side hustle. So it’s the same team I’ve been working with at Nike for all the Undefeated projects, which is an incredible team, I can’t even front. Really, really talented group of people. Through the lens of just the design process, it was the same guys I see pretty regularly already for Undefeated. The part that was new would be this kind of process before design, of pitching the idea. That was a different group of people, but that was super easy and I felt pretty comfortable in pitching it, because the story was an honest, and what I believe to be, really dope story. They were really excited from the jump. Then working with a new team that I hadn’t worked with really on the marketing side, but from the design side, it was a team I worked with quite a bit.
Got you. And I want to get into the story a bit. I know the first pair, the Pistachio, takes inspiration from a Foot Locker Europe exclusive pair. Can you tell me about that?
Basically in the early aughts, let’s just say 2000, Union almost since day one, both stores, but through my lens when I was first working in the New York store, had like a Silk Road relationship with Japan. A lot of our customers were Japanese. We were selling Japanese brands. It was an early, very close relationship. One of the things that we would do early on, even before I got there, Union would do what was called parallel buying. Where you would go to London or Tokyo or Bangladesh, and find some cool shit and buy it and bring it back. And you weren’t buying it at wholesale, you just find it at the store there.
The difference I would say between parallel buying and reselling is the intention. Reselling, the intention is to make as much money [as possible]. Parallel buying, the intention is more like, let me bring something cool that you don’t have access to, from another geo that I can give you access to. It’s not about a money thing, so it’s not done with the same intention if that makes sense. So we would parallel buy from different geos, just to bring something new and interesting in the store.
For most people who might be reading this, I guess the main issue would be this predates eBay. This predates StockX. Nowadays, someone in Switzerland who has access to something that came out in Switzerland exclusively, puts it on StockX and can ship it all over the world. This predates that, so those enterprises definitely didn’t exist. They might have been early, but it still hadn’t evolved to be what it obviously has become to be. I was already doing the buying for the store and I’d have to go to Europe to either London for Duffer or Italy for Pitti Uomo. When I was there, I’d go to Foot Locker, and at the time during that era, Foot Locker would have Dunks in colorways in Europe that weren’t available in America. So I would just buy as many as I could, put them in a big hockey bag and take them back and we put them into a display case. If I bought them for 100 bucks, we’d sell them for $200.
There was no lineup around the corner for it, but certain people who understood, “Oh shit, you can’t get this colorway.” So, one of the ones that I always liked and wanted when I got the chance to do this project, was a Foot Locker-exclusive Dunk High that was this blue and green Pistachio, and so that was the inspiration for this. We obviously made it a Low, we added some different bells and whistles to update the shoe, but the original source material was the Foot Locker-exclusive shoe.
All the shoes have a different reference of a shoe that we would’ve parallel bought, but they’re all part of that story of us going around the world. Again, it wasn’t necessarily a business model, it was just more to bring something cool and unique to the store. It wasn’t like this big money-making thing.
It looks like the blue one maybe has a little bit of an Argon [Dunk] thing going on and I know you’ve talked about your connection to that shoe before.
The blue one is definitely referencing the Argon, for sure. Theoretically, and we haven’t revealed this yet, they all have this ripstop cover, veneer. In theory, you can cut that off and it will reveal the blue Argon shoe, the same colorways in leather. It will reveal the original shoe as it was designed before.
I’ve seen a few teases of it being cut off and that actually leads me to my next question. You did the DIY thing with the Jordan 4 tongue, is that a continuation of the same spirit or was there a different thought process?
I’ll be honest, when I sat down and designed it, I wasn’t like, “Yeah, and let’s make it so you can cut off the fabric.” That kind of evolved as we started making the shoes. One of the things that happened is, actually to be fully transparent, the Nike team did an incredible job of probably just problem solving. There was a point in time where this almost didn’t happen because the original design of the shoe, what we now have as this ripstop fabric, as the outer veneer, was Nexkin, and for the Nexkin to behave properly, it would’ve needed to have been bonded to the leather. And therefore you wouldn’t have been able to cut it off.
The idea was always to take reference from these old shoes, but then bring it into a modern place, like update it. And so what better than to use probably the most popular Nike fabric that’s on the market with Nexkin? But it wasn’t behaving the way we wanted it to against the leather, it would have to have been bonded. Then when you bonded it, it didn’t quite look right and it didn’t really work right. At the stroke of midnight, we had to switch from Nexkin to just a ripstop. And when we did that as a happy mistake almost, we saw that, “Oh, you can actually...” and we don’t have to bond it. It’s just stitched down, so wherever it’s not stitched, you can actually cut it off and take the fabric off.
It’s one of those things, and I wish I designed with that much intent and attention to detail from day one, but almost with every single one of our shoes as we go through the process and as the shoe design evolves, new opportunities become available.
There were a couple other small details on the shoe I want to hear your thoughts on. The Swoosh and the heel almost have a snakeskin look to them with the material and then there’s some of the loose threads on there as well. Can you tell me anything about those choices?
The Swoosh and the heel have 3M reflective. It’s referencing back when, I took reference from running shoes from the ‘90s, they would have 3M reflective so if you ran at night, you were visible. I just took inspiration from that and threw it on there. There’s a potpourri of just little details, just trying to make the shoe interesting. Not all of them are specifically coming directly from this travel and parallel buying thing. I always liked the idea of trying to play with the stitching. We’ve added an extra cosmetic level of stitching, and I got inspired by a selvedge denim. Sometimes you’ll see the thread is left off. So that was coming from that selvedge denim on shirts where you see at the side, they’ll let the thread hang down and I took inspiration from that as an extra detail on the shoe.
Another thing that feels pretty significant is that the Dunk Low uses the Union frontman logo. I don’t know if you have actually used that on a Nike shoe [Ed. Note—it was used subtly on 2009’s Union x Dunk High Challenge Supreme.] Was that a timing thing?
Kind of sort of. The genesis of this was for this to be part of our 30 year. It didn’t end up being that, but it still celebrates that. It’s just not an overt celebration. The genesis was “Hey, it’s our 30 year anniversary Nike and [we] thought it would be a good opportunity to celebrate.” A lot of people who think of Union today, they think of us through the lens of our Jordan relationship, which is incredible, but that’s a newer relationship. They don’t think of Union and our contribution to the sneaker game. I wanted to highlight that we have a significant and long-standing contribution to the sneaker game that people don’t know about because some of it is almost sneaker prehistory. What 20-year-old kid would know that Union was selling Dunks in 2000? They weren’t even alive yet, you know what I mean?
I wanted to pay homage to our relationship because what I pitched, and this is going to sound a little conceited maybe, I don’t know, but I was like if I look at the modern sneaker landscape, Union was one of the early foundational stores that helped things get to this way. And there are a bunch of different reasons as to why people don’t know that about us anymore.
One of them for example, is that Eddie Cruz, and James Bond, who own Undefeated, everyone knows Undefeated and knows their place as deservedly so in the annals of sneaker world. But half of that collab, if you will, which is Eddie Cruz, is who opened up the first Union in LA. Before Undefeated, Union was selling the sneakers. When Undefeated came into existence, they moved all the sneaker accounts from Union into Undefeated. So actually Union is the older brother to Undefeated, not in a literal way. They wouldn’t want it worded that way and I wouldn’t either, but Union preexisted Undefeated, and Union would’ve been selling the sneakers before Undefeated did, if that makes sense.
I wanted to bring that back into the conversation, that we have been around and we actually did, obviously we had the Union 180s that were done in the early aughts. And we did a Dunk in the early aughts as well with Nike, the Dunk High.
I want to hear your thoughts on the Dunk’s status right now. It feels like in the last two years, it’s blown up even more so than it was in the early aughts like you were saying. It’s like Nike’s “it” sneaker right now. As someone who has a longtime connection and appreciation for it, do you have any trepidation over it becoming watered down or played out at all?
I have almost a pluralistic answer to you. Part of me, yeah. Even with us, when we designed this two years ago, it was before all the Dunks came out this year. [Laughs.] So there was a thought of, “Are people going to have Dunk fatigue? Are there too many Dunks out?” so to speak. That was definitely a concern, but that was also balanced with [the fact] I really believe in the design. I was really happy with our final product. Inevitably if it’s dope, people are going to buy it. If it’s wack, they’re not, whether it’s a Dunk, an Air Force 1, whatever. And since I was really happy with the design, that didn’t make me feel as concerned.
Then for me, the Dunk has always been probably my favorite Nike shoe, for sure, and so that’s not going to change. I’ve been wearing Dunks since the late ‘90s. I’m old and stuck in my ways, so I’ll probably continue to do so. I’m excited that a new generation has been able to rediscover the Dunk because I do think it was maybe lost a little bit in the late aughts, people weren’t as up on it as much, you know what I mean? But everything has a cycle, it ebbs and flows. So I’m cool with both the ebbs and the flows, I guess. I like to ride the wave.
I want to look a little bit forward if we can. We’ve seen some leaks of the Air Jordan 2. A couple different colors of the Cortez. Is there anything you can share about those two since they’re already out there?
We have the Jordan 2 capsule collection coming. Another project I’m really excited about, and that’s both footwear and apparel. That’s coming out in the next couple months. We haven’t got a fully executable release date, so I don’t want to be irresponsible, but that’s coming soon. That will be at least the next shoe collaboration that Union reveals. I’m super excited about that.
We have the Nike Cortez projects that we’ve done that are coming out as well. And those are four colorways that are going to happen in two different releases. We had a lot of fun with that. I’m very curious to see how the market digests those. Around here, the joke is we’ve made a Cortez that maybe a traditional Cortez person might not wear, but maybe a person who doesn’t usually wear Cortez wears, or maybe they both will. I’m very curious and excited to see how those shoes are digested. We definitely, intentionally tried to make a Cortez different than what you’ve ever seen. I’m super happy with those shoes, very proud of them. So that’ll come out in the summer or in the spring. Again, no exact release dates yet. Full transparency, supply chain issues are hurting everyone and so the release dates have been pushed. Both the Dunk Lows and the Jordan 2 were supposed to have come out last year.
The Jordan 2, I probably shouldn’t bring attention to this, but again I’m a big proponent of, it’s going to do well because of the design. So this detail hopefully won’t affect it, but people who have already seen it say “HO21,” because it was supposed to be a Holiday ‘21 release, but supply chain issues, COVID, all that good stuff.
Speaking of the delays, even if the Cortez and the Jordan 2 came out last year, that still would’ve been a huge year for Union because you [also] had the Jordan 4 over the summer. Three big Nike projects is not really something that a lot of stores or brands get the opportunity to do. How does that feel, to have these multiple high-profile projects in one year and a short span of time?
We’re spoiled, there’s no other way to say it. I feel honored and blessed to be able to be participating in this. As we’ve now been saying around here, we’re used to one a year. Last year would’ve been three, which would’ve been crazy. This year’s going to be six.
We have a Jordan collection that will drop in the holiday, and then my wife has her own shoe that she’s doing as well. Which is her, but not maybe me, but it’s still family.