by MARK SLUTSKY

My Adidas walk through concert doors
And roam all over coliseum floors
I stepped on stage at Live Aid
All the people gave and the poor got paid
And out of speakers I did speak
I wore my sneakers but I’m not a sneak
—Run-DMC, “My Adidas”

“Most people have no idea that a brand like Adidas would not exist in America—and to a certain extent in the world as an international force—if it wasn’t for Run-DMC singing ‘My Adidas’ in 1986,” says filmmaker Thibaut De Longeville. “And if they do know that, it’s something that the brands, these huge corporate forces, still have a hard time acknowledging.”

Sneaker expert De Longeville, along with Lisa Leone, directed Just For Kicks, a slick, and funny documentary that explores the history and culture of sneakers, and how they became a $26-billion industry. It’s hard to imagine a time when running shoes were just that—tools for athletes and not signifiers of style or class. In the early ’70s, according to the film, 99 per cent of sneaker sales were athletic, and the remaining one per cent was what companies consider “lifestyle.” Nowadays, athletic purchases make up only about 20 per cent of the market. They were, according to De Longeville, “products of mass consumption, created for you to run faster or jump higher. But we made them a staple of culture.”

How that happened exactly is one of the main currents of Just for Kicks, which starts its story in New York City in the late ’70s. As hip hop was born, so was sneaker culture, and, like most nascent cultural movements, it was started by smart, bored kids messing around and making their own entertainment—whether it be rapping, graffiti, breaking or dressing up.

“It was such a big deal to be creative, to be cross-hatching your laces, red laces and blue laces, and you couldn’t just wear fat laces, you had to wear super-fat!” De Longeville enthuses about those early days. “It was something to be part of, you had to be creative. You had to stand out.”

Flashdance fever

For De Longeville, who admits to owning somewhere in the ballpark of 300 pairs of sneakers (“You grow up and you have 20 pairs of sneakers, and it becomes 50 and then it becomes 100 and then it becomes those crazy numbers that I do not want to disclose!”), the topic came naturally.

The Paris-based director was born and raised in Senegal, but West Africa’s relative remoteness from the Bronx did nothing to arrest his obsession with running shoes. “It comes from growing up on hip hop,” he says. “Even though we were not from the U.S., we were wearing Pumas because of Rock Steady Crew, we were wearing Adidas because of Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, and we were in Jordans because of Public Enemy and NWA and Spike Lee’s movies. It was somehow a symbol of our culture.”

A culture that, before the Internet, before global MTV, was much more difficult to access: “I discovered hip hop through the movie Flashdance! Every girl in my school wanted to be a homegirl in Flashdance and we wanted to date them! And the only dudes that were cool in that film were Rock Steady Crew, and we were like. ‘We want to dance like these dudes!’ So that was the way that we accessed this stuff. Anything that we got passionate about—underground tapes, or your cousin that has a copy of this video—you grow up cherishing these things because in a sense you had to struggle so much to access this stuff.”

Wave your shoes in the air

Just for Kicks pegs the success of “My Adidas” and Run-DMC’s subsequent million-dollar deal with the company as the point when the sneaker craze exploded, moving from underground culture to pop culture to corporate culture. “The story of ‘My Adidas’ is a great pop culture story, but it’s very little known, it was never documented,” says De Longeville.

In the film, rapper DMC (who just left Adidas and signed a new endorsement deal with the French line Le Coq Sportif) claims it was their manager Russell Simmons who came up with the idea when he was high on angel dust. As the song became a hit, Simmons and the group had the idea to invite Adidas execs all the way from Germany to a concert in Madison Square Garden. De Longeville and his team managed to dig up an incredibly rare video that Run-DMC made to pitch their sponsorship idea to Adidas. It’s a fascinating and hilarious document of the time, almost innocent in its own way, that ends with DJ Run demanding, “So give us a million dollars!” That would become a reality after the Adidas execs attended that now-legendary concert, where the group urged their fans to wave their Adidas shoes in the air, and they did en masse.

The five-year plan

Of course, multi-million-dollar contracts are common nowadays, and rappers are just as likely to endorse sneakers as athletes (Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Pharrell Williams, Missy Elliott and countless others boast their own imprints—“Can’t believe Reebok did a deal with a psycho,” raps 50 on “Stunt 101”). But it isn’t the money that seems to motivate most of the obsessives who appear in Just for Kicks, including old-school rap and graf legends like DMC, Grandmaster Caz, and Fab 5 Freddy, modern-day players like Raekwon and Damon Dash and your straight-up, non-celebrity fanatics, like sneaker hunter Tommy Rebel.

For these kinds of hardcore collectors, de Longeville says, “It’s sort of a revenge for poor kids. You want to get even with your youth. You’re 30 years old, you have a job, and you see all these shoes you wish you had when you were 17—so fuck that, you’re buying every single thing!”

De Longeville wanted to represent the full spectrum of these addicts: “I love the fact that I was able to put, in the same film, Tommy Rebel, DMC, and Damon Dash, who are at heart very, very, very different, but who share that same passion,” says De Longeville. “But what they’re getting out of it is very different.”

For instance, Rebel, who collects shoes from the late ’80s and early ’90s, is a design connoisseur and clearly loves reliving or re-imagining the past through shoes.

That’s in contrast to people like Roc-A-Fella CEO and DJ Clark Kent, who take pride in never wearing the same pair twice. In the film, Clark Kent claims to have five years’ worth of sneakers. Meaning he could wear a different pair of kicks—and we’re talking different individual makes here, no two alike—every day for five years. “You are obsessed with originality, or you’re obsessed with numbers, or you’re obsessed with being cool, or you’re obsessed with being fresh, with this or with that,” De Longeville says, including himself in the madness. “It becomes an intricate mix of a lot of obsessions that really, we’re glad to confess to.”

Treading lightly

One thing Just for Kicks doesn’t confess to, though, is the controversy that has dogged sneaker corporations for years. Nike, in particular, has been singled out time and again for contracting out work to companies and factories in Asia with records of shoddy treatment of workers and poor working conditions. Why leave that out?

“Just for Kicks is an entertaining piece, it’s not a political piece,” De Longeville says. “There’s a lot to say about the conditions in which these sneakers are manufactured, about the whole system of exploitation, but as you see, we don’t touch that subject in the film. One of the reasons why is that no one wants to touch that subject in hip hop.” Ultimately De Longeville says that he wanted to celebrate the “cheerful, joyful, adolescent aspect” of sneakers and that he’s considering doing another, separate film about the controversy. Nevertheless the omission still stands out.

In the meantime, has making the film been therapeutic for the sneaker-obsessed De Longeville, or has it just exacerbated things? “I promised myself that I wasn’t going to buy any shoes throughout the shoot,” he says. “I disciplined myself and did not buy a single pair of shoes during the whole process. So I was almost out of rehab, but when the film was completed I started buying shoes again!”

Just For Kicks screens at Ex-Centris as part of Resfest Saturday, Nov. 26, at 8 p.m. For more info, visit www.resfest.ca

>> Movie Listings