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