The shoe’s brief revival in the ’80s and ‘90s, fuelled by grunge culture, with Kurt Cobain as its poster boy, marked a cultural shift in the brand’s destiny. With affordability and great design on its side, Converse sneakers, now available in a variety of materials and hues, and even in knee-high versions, had been bubbling up through the baby boomer generation as a casual footwear staple ever since James Dean was pictured in his Jack Purcell Converse kicks in the 1950s. These kids were uninterested in the shoe’s basketball roots. Among the Converse-sporting rockers, Tommy Ramone, drummer of The Ramones, when asked who Chuck Taylor was replied: “He was maybe a basketball coach or something. I don't know. He made cheap shoes
急救產品.”
Ramones,1978 (AF archive/Alamy)
痛經Canvassing opinion
As big a part as non-slip rubber played in the Chuck Taylors’ early history, canvas, its other main ingredient, was to lead Converse into the future. After several management changes, the beleaguered brand crashed and burned in the early ’00s, filing for bankruptcy in 2001. But its rescuer, Nike Inc, has steered Converse away from its performance message towards creative expression, working with a range of big-impact collaborators, including fashion brands like Givenchy, Missoni, and Maison Martin Margiela. (A new capsule collection released in May saw the brand’s iconic Jack Purcell and Chuck Taylor All Star styles daubed in the latter fashion house’s signature white paint). Recent artistic dalliances, meanwhile, include a limited edition capsule of Chuck Taylor All Stars honed from two of Nate Lowman’s slashed up canvases, with each pair selling for $25,000. The formula seems to have worked, with Converse raking in a reported $1.4bn in sales in 2012, versus a reported $205m in 2002
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