Chris Blackstone
Chris Blackstone: Growing up, I lived in
Southern California. During first, second, and
third grade, I had my mom driving me around
Los Angeles, to try to find sneakers. So, I’ve
been into them for the longest time, and then
once I got into high school, I was finally able
to buy them on my own and go into shops.
I loved the anticipation back then, when you
didn’t know anything about a sneaker until it
showed up in the store. The catalogs take me
back to that. I’ve been collecting them for four
or five years. It’s not only the nostalgia of the
catalogs, but you get to see the whole spread
of what a brand did.
For me, a lot of it goes back to when the East-
bay catalogs first started getting the Nike and
Air Jordan stuff. Back in the early 1990s, you
would get the catalog, and it was a very tan-
gible artifact that you could look through and
circle stuff, and talk about it with your friends.
I always had that interest in the ads and the
catalogs. There’s a functionality to them, and
a simplicity, that gives all the information I
was interested in finding out about the shoes;
96 | Classic Kicks | classickicks.com | Volume 2
all the different colorways, and stuff like that.
Now, especially when so much of the focus is
on digital and it being so immediate, and yet
there’s not a lot of depth to it at times. The
printed material is very physical, and I can
remember where I was the first time I saw the
ads, or the sneakers, and they’re just more per-
manent than seeing a digital ad somewhere.
I probably got my first catalog around five
years ago. The first ones I got were the mid
1990s ones, like 1994 and 1995, because they
would pop upon eBay once in a while. Those
years were my junior and senior years of high
school, so prime time for me with that stuff.
The ones that are really hard to find are the
late 1980s and early 1990s catalogs. I’ve gotten
a few very recently, but those pop up so