CLASSIC KICKS MAGAZINE VOLUME 2 | Page 47

Luis Miguel Lozano What do you collect? Luis Miguel: I try to draw a chronological line of Nike from the early 1970s to nowadays. I want to have running evolution, basketball evolution, and tennis evolution. I focus on two things. On one hand, it’s sneakers I have mem- ories related to, from when I was a kid. I was born in 1976, so I grew up in the 1980s with all the Jordans, the first Pegasus, and all that stuff. It’s the core of my collection. Once I was into collecting, I started discovering shoes from the 1970s. I need to complete a line from then until now. In my collection you’ll find the Marathon ‘72, very old Cortez, Waffle Rac- ers, Challengers, Eagles, Mariahs. You’ll also find the last Lunar Epic or the coming Zoom Vapor Four Percent. I try to draw that line. That’s the description I give of my collection. When did you become a collector? Since I was a kid, I was really nuts about sneakers, especially Nike. I also loved Con- verse because it was the American brand that came to Spain. In the 1970s, we had nothing coming from the States, and in the early 1980s, the shoes started coming. I was crazy about those first designs, especially the Air Jordan, the first Air Max, and the first Air Trainer. The mid 1980s were the starting point for me. I started “collecting” in 1998 or 1999. There were no media like today. There was no Face- book or anything. One day I was thinking that I would love to get a pair of the first Air Jordan model I had as a kid. The Air Jordan 1 in blue metallic. That was my very first pair of Nike sneakers. So in 1999, I tried to get it again. How did you get it? I just thought about it and said, “How can I get that pair?” That’s all I could do because there was no eBay. There was nothing! I grew up in Jumilla, which has become famous throughout the world for its wine. We had no sneaker stores back then, so the only way to get sneakers was to go to Murcia, which is the capital of the region. As a kid, that was where I did my “Masters Class” on sneakers because whenever I had to go there with my mother to go shopping or to the doctor or whatever, I spent my whole morning in the store, examin- ing everything and trying them on. It was my passion. From those years, I remember having the Air Jordan 1, Alpha Force, Converse Celt- ics, some Reeboks. What attracted you to these shoes? It was a combination of everything, but it started with Michael Jordan because around that time, the NBA was arriving in Spain. The arrival of the NBA, combined with the arrival of these American brands, Nike and Converse, made my generation crazy about sneakers. I have many friends who were into sneakers, and we were all infected by the same things, Michael Jordan and the NBA on one hand and the attractive sneaker models on the other. The Air Jordan was attractive, the Air Max was crazy, the Air Trainer was crazy, and the Air Revolution was crazy because it was a big change from traditional design. When you compare it to other models from the time, for example, comparing a Converse basketball sneaker to the Air Revolution is crazy. It was the most technological shoe back then. The first time I saw the Air Revolution was on a friend of mine whose mother used to travel to the United States, and every year she bought him a pair of sneakers. So that year, he and his brother both got the Air Revolutions. A blue pair and a red pair. I remember the first time I saw him wea