Rewrite 
It’s painfully cold out. That’s one of the few things that we know for sure, standing on a quiet sidewalk in Brooklyn, one block removed from the Dumbo waterfront on Saturday morning. We also know that this is where London streetwear brand Corteiz recorded a promo video for its black pony-hair Nike Air Trainer Huarache collaboration that’s a few hours away from dropping at an undisclosed location in New York City. The video showed a streetside kiosk with the sneaker on display, but there’s no trace of that setup in Dumbo on this still, bitter morning.
We—myself, a friend, a coworker, and about 14 others—are waiting in a loose line across from where the kiosk was, torsos bubbled up in marshmallow jackets and hands mostly in pockets because the temperature is a good 10 degrees south of freezing. It’s not 9:30 a.m. yet, and the sun isn’t touching our section of the block, but you kinda feel like it wouldn’t help much anyway. About half of the small group is wearing at least one piece of Corteiz gear. One guy pulls up in a grey Corteiz x Nike track top before realizing he needs more serious outerwear and does a half jog back to his car for another layer. I can feel the tips of my toes in my Spiridons clocking out.
We don’t actually know if the sneaker release will happen here. We don’t know if it will be the first or last stop in our pursuit for the shoe. But we’re here anyway, hopeful that the sleuthing that led us to the spot will give us an edge in the hunt. How did we get here?
The teaser video, uploaded to Corteiz’s Instagram Story on Friday, included just enough clues to bring the brand’s most devoted followers to Plymouth Street in Dumbo.
I couldn’t crack the code myself, but the friend who made the trek on Saturday—a graffiti-obsessed New Yorker who’s spent a good chunk of his life analyzing the city’s walls and street-level idiosyncrasies—figured it out in 30 minutes.
The old streetcar tracks embedded in the cobblestone shown in the teaser were the giveaway—only a few areas in New York City have that unique feature. He went, in his words, “full Rain Man,” and after enough dragging of the little yellow man on Google Maps, landed at 191 Plymouth Street. The image matched Corteiz’s perfectly, down to a grate in front of the sidewalk and two distinct paint marks on the curb. My friend was 95 percent sure this was the place, he told me the night before.
There’s a kid in a Nocta puffer jacket who says a friend who’s a whiz at GeoGuessr, a geography game where you guess the location of random images from Google Maps, found the spot for him. The Nocta Puffer Kid is one of the first ones to show up on Saturday, although he says he doesn’t really like the Trainer Huarache; he’s in it for the sport. He dipped out of high school last year when the Air Max 95s from Corteiz’s first Nike collaboration hit the city, joining the mobs who ran, rode, and CitiBiked through Manhattan for the shoes.
The first person to arrive after me, Alban Hyseni, let AI show him the way.
“I literally asked ChatGPT,” Hyseni says. He figured the location was in Brooklyn since the Corteiz post was geo-tagged to the borough. Hyseni punched in a query asking ChatGPT where in Brooklyn there were train tracks and red bricks in the road. It told him to come right to Plymouth Street.
Corteiz, which launched in 2017, has sometimes exercised a modern version of old-school streetwear standoffishness. The brand’s founder and face, Clint Ogbenna, who goes by the handle Clint419 online, kept Corteiz’s Instagram page private in its nascent days. He seems, from his online presence at least, to be a bit of a troll; he’s said that were he not running Corteiz, he’d be a full-time hater in Instagram comments.
Corteiz, or Corteiz RTW (that’s “Rules the World”), built a cult following partly because of its intentionally demanding releases. When the brand releases clothing online, it does so through a password-protected site. The real rite of passage for the Corteiz zealot is the in-person experience, where you might be asked to race across a city or complete a challenge to secure an item. These quests—for popular Corteiz items like the cargo pants bearing its Alcatraz logo or the thick “bolo” jackets—let the Corteiz follower feel like they are participating in culture, and not just commerce.
There is little sign of one of those gauntlets happening right now, though. When I first emerged from the subway in Brooklyn, the only people around were European tourists and panhandlers trying to pry a few dollars from them. There’s none of the infrastructure that comes with a hype Nike drop in sight—no barricades, no security detail chirping into walkie-talkies.
For all our ingenuity, it’s very possible we are wasting our time. The Corteiz post never said that the shoes were dropping at the location pictured in the video. The caption gave an overview of the release procedure: At 10 a.m. on Saturday, Corteiz would announce the locations of newsstands around the city housing mock Corteiz newspapers with the location of the actual sneaker drop printed on the back. Shoppers would need to bring a physical newspaper to the mystery location in order to buy the Huaraches; if you really want the shoes, you can’t take a shortcut to get them.
So maybe the newspapers will show up in a matter of minutes in Dumbo, maybe the actual storefront will pop out of the back of a box truck, or maybe we are not as smart as we thought we were. There’s a non-zero chance we are in the wrong location, even though we found the right spot.
We’re aware of all this, but we give ourselves hope in small ways. The Nocta Puffer Kid, who has too much pep for how cold it is, clocks the cars passing by and makes an announcement like Clint has arrived every time a halfway clean luxury vehicle starts pushing up the cobblestone street.
There’s also this white Mercedes Sprinter van with New Jersey plates that keeps circling the block. The beanied man behind the wheel has to know something. On the first pass, at 10:08, we get his attention. He rolls the window down, and I ask if he’s got the shoes in the back. The driver pauses for dramatic effect, scans the line to let the anticipation build, and then gives us just a syllable in response.
“Nope,” he says, and drives away.
By 10:12, the Corteiz announcement on where the newspapers will be is overdue, and we still have no inkling that we made the right choice by showing up in Dumbo. A couple minutes later, an Instagram Story finally hits with three different addresses: one in Manhattan, one in Queens, and one in Brooklyn—but not where we are.
In a matter of minutes, the small crowd scatters. Nobody is willing to risk missing out on the actual coordinates from the newspaper. Some poor guy on a bike pushes off to the west with who appears to be his little brother on another bike behind him. My coworker hops in an Uber to pursue a paper in the city, promising to keep me updated. My friend and I stay in place, clinging to the fast-diminishing hope that we are where we need to be.
The white Sprinter van rolls up the street a third time. I block his path and demand answers. Is this a decoy?
“I know it looks suspicious, white van,” the guy driving says. “You can look in the back, there’s nothing here.”
He’s telling the truth, it’s empty, and our galaxy-brain gambit is looking more foolish with the passing of each frigid minute. More time creeps by—it’s just my friend and me in the street now—until my coworker sends an update with the coordinates from the back of the Corteiz newspaper. This is our official notice to pack it up; we were wrong on the drop spot.
The friend struggles to punch the coordinates into his phone as I read out the long string of digits again and again. I wonder if I can get away with wiping some of the snot from my runny nose into the gloves I borrowed from him while he’s focused on the phone. We misplace a crucial dash in the coordinates, and the phone points us to somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, which sounds warmer than where are now but is too far to travel for these particular sneakers.
Finally we get the location right, and it looks like the Corteiz x Nike Air Trainer Huarache release is set to take place in the parking lot of a McDonald’s on the east end of Bed-Stuy. We pinch into the map a little closer and it makes a lot more sense. Part of me is mad, part of me is impressed. We decide to forgo the newspaper and instead head straight for the launch.
The real spot for the launch, not the red herring on Plymouth Street, is Tom Dick & Harry, a storied mom-and-pop sneaker shop on the Bushwick side of Broadway in Brooklyn. Clint and Corteiz are tourists in New York, but hosting the Huarache release there reads like an intentional display of respect for the city’s sneaker history. TomDees is an institution in the neighborhood, a rare non-boutique account that survived Nike’s brutal direct-to-consumer pivot in the 2020s. When Jay-Z shot the music video for his 1997 track “Streets Is Watching,” he went to Tom Dick & Harry, which is up the road from where he grew up in the Marcy Projects public housing complex.
An Uber gets us there in about 12 minutes, delivering us from Dumbo and onto a lively strip of Broadway right under the JMZ line. We are in the right place—we can tell immediately.
Outside of Tom Dick & Harry, there’s a human billboard, a man wearing a head-to-toe spandex suit and black Air Force 1s with a 6-foot-wide Corteiz Alcatraz logo wrapped around his midsection. (It could be the same guy who was behind the wheel of the mysterious Sprinter van, but he’s got a shiesty obscuring most of his face so I can’t be sure.)
Clint is here, beaming, popping out of the store every few minutes to take in the scene. Shoppers crowd around him when he steps outside, putting a Sharpie in his hand and asking him to sign their boxes and newspapers. They study the Huaraches once they secure them, unwrapping the tissue paper on the corner to take in the details: Alcatraz logo on the strap, subtle camo on the inner bootie, a shiny dog tag attached.
A couple of the guys you see running security at every Nike event in the city are around—there’s the tall bald one who looks like a more gaunt Jeffrey Tambor, and the dude with the dark hair and badass ’80s action-flick henchman voice.
All Day Frank is here. Mayor rolls in slow, parks his Maybach in a spot where he is definitely not allowed to park, and lets me wear his Terror Squad chain for 17 minutes while he goes inside to fetch the Huarache. Were he still alive and in good health, DJ Clark Kent, a longtime TomDees customer, probably would have been here.
The energy, the kind you won’t find buying shoes off an app or arguing about them in Instagram comments, is here.
Tom Dick & Harry looks mostly the same today as it ever was, save for the vinyl Corteiz graphics, made to look like janky old-school sports-shop adverts, that are affixed to the windows and barricades. Inside there is black-out slat board displaying the $210 Huarache collab, and only Corteiz gear for sale (no Hush Puppies).
There’s a slow-moving line that stretches to the end of the short side of the block, but people are patient, maybe numbed out by the cold. There are no police, but plenty of security regulating the sidewalk space. A pack of Nike employees stands around watching. (Working? Who knows.)
Bahr Brown, an older New Yorker who seems to be something like a spiritual advisor to Clint, is in the mix. Brown knows what makes this place hallowed ground, and you get the sense that he set up the TomDees play.
Shortly after my friend and I arrive, we see Hyseni, the kid who pulled up second at the fake-out spot in Dumbo, emerge from the store, Corteiz sneakers in hand. Despite the mixup earlier in the morning, he ended up eighth in line for the sneakers at Tom Dick & Harry. He says the misfire was not a significant handicap—where we’d waited an hour earlier was only a 10-minute drive from the closest newsstand, which was about a 10-minute drive to the shop.
“The wrong spot ended up being the right spot,” Hyseni says.
Part of the reason he’d been able to secure such a high position in line, and part of the reason for the lack of police presence, is that the competition for the sneakers is not that fierce. Corteiz’s first Nike sneakers, the Air Max 95s from 2023, retailed for $190 and fetch around $600 on the secondary market. But the Trainer Huarache is a less coveted model, and sneaker resale is slumping in general.
There is money to be made for the resellers, though, who are here, too. Andre Arias, a New York City reseller who will pop out if ever there is a margin to be made in footwear arbitrage, is present, reluctantly.
“I didn’t even wanna do this,” Arias says. “It’s $200 and change retail. It’s 10 degrees in New York City.”
Arias, who goes by Sole Street, says the streets wanted the sneaker, and it’s his job to procure it. He was driving down the FDR, contemplating an exit on Houston, when Corteiz announced the newsstand locations. He sped to pick one up at Iconic Magazines on Mulberry, the one location in Manhattan where the newspapers were available.
Arias is not buying a personal pair—”pony hair is not for a 41-year-old man”—and is wary about ending up with more units of the Corteiz Huaraches than he can move. His plan is to fulfill the preorders he received, looping bodies in and out of the line to grab the stock he needs, and back off from there.
“I don’t really want to be stuck with extra sizes of these,” Arias says. “I don’t have the highest level of confidence.”
Nobody here is anticipating the black Corteiz x Nike Air Trainer Huarache being a seriously profitable resale shoe. The other two colorways from the project that have already been released can be had for around their retail price on the secondary market. What does this mean for Corteiz and the people who fanned out across the city to participate in the release?
It could mean that more pairs will end up going straight to feet than would at a more high-heat launch—if you can’t make money off the shoe, you don’t really have a better option than to (gasp) actually wear it. It could mean that the real prize is the thrill of the increasingly rare experience of hunting down the product and interacting with others on the same mission in real life, and not whatever sum you take home after StockX takes a vig on the flip. This second thought occurs to me as I chat throughout the day with my coworker and friend, both of whom are young enough to have never physically lined up for shoes before.
That the black Corteiz x Nike Air Trainer Huarache does not represent a major payday also means that missing out on the shoe today shouldn’t register as a big loss for prospective shoppers.
Scanning around the few hundred people gathered outside, I recognize members of the misguided bunch that were camped out in Dumbo earlier that morning. Most of them have decent spots in line, and should get the shoes. An outlier is 21-year-old Kayli Cox, who wears a white T-shirt over a mustard-colored Corteiz hoodie. I find him at Tom Dick & Harry’s floating through the crowd, aiming toward a secondary line for the sneakers that’s set up across the street.
“We got bamboozled,” Cox says, reflecting on how the morning unfolded.
He found the Dumbo location by scrolling through a Corteiz thread on Reddit. Cox didn’t know what he expected to find there, but went anyway. He made it to a newsstand location relatively soon after they were announced, only to get jammed up when the workers manning the site wouldn’t let him jump out to grab one with his car running curbside. The papers were going quick. Cox managed to snatch one, but the line at TomDees was deep by the time he arrived.
Cox is willing to stick around and try his luck, but is not desperate. He will hop on line and wait it out. Even if the Huarache doesn’t come to him, he’s happy to take home the Corteiz newspaper and a few photos as tokens from the chase.
“I didn’t even want the shoes, to be honest,” Cox says. “For me it’s a culture thing—I just like coming outside.”
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It’s painfully cold out. That’s one of the few things that we know for sure, standing on a quiet sidewalk in Brooklyn, one block removed from the Dumbo waterfront on Saturday morning. We also know that this is where London streetwear brand Corteiz recorded a promo video for its black pony-hair Nike Air Trainer Huarache collaboration that’s a few hours away from dropping at an undisclosed location in New York City. The video showed a streetside kiosk with the sneaker on display, but there’s no trace of that setup in Dumbo on this still, bitter morning.
We—myself, a friend, a coworker, and about 14 others—are waiting in a loose line across from where the kiosk was, torsos bubbled up in marshmallow jackets and hands mostly in pockets because the temperature is a good 10 degrees south of freezing. It’s not 9:30 a.m. yet, and the sun isn’t touching our section of the block, but you kinda feel like it wouldn’t help much anyway. About half of the small group is wearing at least one piece of Corteiz gear. One guy pulls up in a grey Corteiz x Nike track top before realizing he needs more serious outerwear and does a half jog back to his car for another layer. I can feel the tips of my toes in my Spiridons clocking out.
We don’t actually know if the sneaker release will happen here. We don’t know if it will be the first or last stop in our pursuit for the shoe. But we’re here anyway, hopeful that the sleuthing that led us to the spot will give us an edge in the hunt. How did we get here?
The teaser video, uploaded to Corteiz’s Instagram Story on Friday, included just enough clues to bring the brand’s most devoted followers to Plymouth Street in Dumbo.
I couldn’t crack the code myself, but the friend who made the trek on Saturday—a graffiti-obsessed New Yorker who’s spent a good chunk of his life analyzing the city’s walls and street-level idiosyncrasies—figured it out in 30 minutes.
The old streetcar tracks embedded in the cobblestone shown in the teaser were the giveaway—only a few areas in New York City have that unique feature. He went, in his words, “full Rain Man,” and after enough dragging of the little yellow man on Google Maps, landed at 191 Plymouth Street. The image matched Corteiz’s perfectly, down to a grate in front of the sidewalk and two distinct paint marks on the curb. My friend was 95 percent sure this was the place, he told me the night before.
There’s a kid in a Nocta puffer jacket who says a friend who’s a whiz at GeoGuessr, a geography game where you guess the location of random images from Google Maps, found the spot for him. The Nocta Puffer Kid is one of the first ones to show up on Saturday, although he says he doesn’t really like the Trainer Huarache; he’s in it for the sport. He dipped out of high school last year when the Air Max 95s from Corteiz’s first Nike collaboration hit the city, joining the mobs who ran, rode, and CitiBiked through Manhattan for the shoes.
The first person to arrive after me, Alban Hyseni, let AI show him the way.
“I literally asked ChatGPT,” Hyseni says. He figured the location was in Brooklyn since the Corteiz post was geo-tagged to the borough. Hyseni punched in a query asking ChatGPT where in Brooklyn there were train tracks and red bricks in the road. It told him to come right to Plymouth Street.
Corteiz, which launched in 2017, has sometimes exercised a modern version of old-school streetwear standoffishness. The brand’s founder and face, Clint Ogbenna, who goes by the handle Clint419 online, kept Corteiz’s Instagram page private in its nascent days. He seems, from his online presence at least, to be a bit of a troll; he’s said that were he not running Corteiz, he’d be a full-time hater in Instagram comments.
Corteiz, or Corteiz RTW (that’s “Rules the World”), built a cult following partly because of its intentionally demanding releases. When the brand releases clothing online, it does so through a password-protected site. The real rite of passage for the Corteiz zealot is the in-person experience, where you might be asked to race across a city or complete a challenge to secure an item. These quests—for popular Corteiz items like the cargo pants bearing its Alcatraz logo or the thick “bolo” jackets—let the Corteiz follower feel like they are participating in culture, and not just commerce.
There is little sign of one of those gauntlets happening right now, though. When I first emerged from the subway in Brooklyn, the only people around were European tourists and panhandlers trying to pry a few dollars from them. There’s none of the infrastructure that comes with a hype Nike drop in sight—no barricades, no security detail chirping into walkie-talkies.
For all our ingenuity, it’s very possible we are wasting our time. The Corteiz post never said that the shoes were dropping at the location pictured in the video. The caption gave an overview of the release procedure: At 10 a.m. on Saturday, Corteiz would announce the locations of newsstands around the city housing mock Corteiz newspapers with the location of the actual sneaker drop printed on the back. Shoppers would need to bring a physical newspaper to the mystery location in order to buy the Huaraches; if you really want the shoes, you can’t take a shortcut to get them.
So maybe the newspapers will show up in a matter of minutes in Dumbo, maybe the actual storefront will pop out of the back of a box truck, or maybe we are not as smart as we thought we were. There’s a non-zero chance we are in the wrong location, even though we found the right spot.
We’re aware of all this, but we give ourselves hope in small ways. The Nocta Puffer Kid, who has too much pep for how cold it is, clocks the cars passing by and makes an announcement like Clint has arrived every time a halfway clean luxury vehicle starts pushing up the cobblestone street.
There’s also this white Mercedes Sprinter van with New Jersey plates that keeps circling the block. The beanied man behind the wheel has to know something. On the first pass, at 10:08, we get his attention. He rolls the window down, and I ask if he’s got the shoes in the back. The driver pauses for dramatic effect, scans the line to let the anticipation build, and then gives us just a syllable in response.
“Nope,” he says, and drives away.
By 10:12, the Corteiz announcement on where the newspapers will be is overdue, and we still have no inkling that we made the right choice by showing up in Dumbo. A couple minutes later, an Instagram Story finally hits with three different addresses: one in Manhattan, one in Queens, and one in Brooklyn—but not where we are.
In a matter of minutes, the small crowd scatters. Nobody is willing to risk missing out on the actual coordinates from the newspaper. Some poor guy on a bike pushes off to the west with who appears to be his little brother on another bike behind him. My coworker hops in an Uber to pursue a paper in the city, promising to keep me updated. My friend and I stay in place, clinging to the fast-diminishing hope that we are where we need to be.
The white Sprinter van rolls up the street a third time. I block his path and demand answers. Is this a decoy?
“I know it looks suspicious, white van,” the guy driving says. “You can look in the back, there’s nothing here.”
He’s telling the truth, it’s empty, and our galaxy-brain gambit is looking more foolish with the passing of each frigid minute. More time creeps by—it’s just my friend and me in the street now—until my coworker sends an update with the coordinates from the back of the Corteiz newspaper. This is our official notice to pack it up; we were wrong on the drop spot.
The friend struggles to punch the coordinates into his phone as I read out the long string of digits again and again. I wonder if I can get away with wiping some of the snot from my runny nose into the gloves I borrowed from him while he’s focused on the phone. We misplace a crucial dash in the coordinates, and the phone points us to somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, which sounds warmer than where are now but is too far to travel for these particular sneakers.
Finally we get the location right, and it looks like the Corteiz x Nike Air Trainer Huarache release is set to take place in the parking lot of a McDonald’s on the east end of Bed-Stuy. We pinch into the map a little closer and it makes a lot more sense. Part of me is mad, part of me is impressed. We decide to forgo the newspaper and instead head straight for the launch.
The real spot for the launch, not the red herring on Plymouth Street, is Tom Dick & Harry, a storied mom-and-pop sneaker shop on the Bushwick side of Broadway in Brooklyn. Clint and Corteiz are tourists in New York, but hosting the Huarache release there reads like an intentional display of respect for the city’s sneaker history. TomDees is an institution in the neighborhood, a rare non-boutique account that survived Nike’s brutal direct-to-consumer pivot in the 2020s. When Jay-Z shot the music video for his 1997 track “Streets Is Watching,” he went to Tom Dick & Harry, which is up the road from where he grew up in the Marcy Projects public housing complex.
An Uber gets us there in about 12 minutes, delivering us from Dumbo and onto a lively strip of Broadway right under the JMZ line. We are in the right place—we can tell immediately.
Outside of Tom Dick & Harry, there’s a human billboard, a man wearing a head-to-toe spandex suit and black Air Force 1s with a 6-foot-wide Corteiz Alcatraz logo wrapped around his midsection. (It could be the same guy who was behind the wheel of the mysterious Sprinter van, but he’s got a shiesty obscuring most of his face so I can’t be sure.)
Clint is here, beaming, popping out of the store every few minutes to take in the scene. Shoppers crowd around him when he steps outside, putting a Sharpie in his hand and asking him to sign their boxes and newspapers. They study the Huaraches once they secure them, unwrapping the tissue paper on the corner to take in the details: Alcatraz logo on the strap, subtle camo on the inner bootie, a shiny dog tag attached.
A couple of the guys you see running security at every Nike event in the city are around—there’s the tall bald one who looks like a more gaunt Jeffrey Tambor, and the dude with the dark hair and badass ’80s action-flick henchman voice.
All Day Frank is here. Mayor rolls in slow, parks his Maybach in a spot where he is definitely not allowed to park, and lets me wear his Terror Squad chain for 17 minutes while he goes inside to fetch the Huarache. Were he still alive and in good health, DJ Clark Kent, a longtime TomDees customer, probably would have been here.
The energy, the kind you won’t find buying shoes off an app or arguing about them in Instagram comments, is here.
Tom Dick & Harry looks mostly the same today as it ever was, save for the vinyl Corteiz graphics, made to look like janky old-school sports-shop adverts, that are affixed to the windows and barricades. Inside there is black-out slat board displaying the $210 Huarache collab, and only Corteiz gear for sale (no Hush Puppies).
There’s a slow-moving line that stretches to the end of the short side of the block, but people are patient, maybe numbed out by the cold. There are no police, but plenty of security regulating the sidewalk space. A pack of Nike employees stands around watching. (Working? Who knows.)
Bahr Brown, an older New Yorker who seems to be something like a spiritual advisor to Clint, is in the mix. Brown knows what makes this place hallowed ground, and you get the sense that he set up the TomDees play.
Shortly after my friend and I arrive, we see Hyseni, the kid who pulled up second at the fake-out spot in Dumbo, emerge from the store, Corteiz sneakers in hand. Despite the mixup earlier in the morning, he ended up eighth in line for the sneakers at Tom Dick & Harry. He says the misfire was not a significant handicap—where we’d waited an hour earlier was only a 10-minute drive from the closest newsstand, which was about a 10-minute drive to the shop.
“The wrong spot ended up being the right spot,” Hyseni says.
Part of the reason he’d been able to secure such a high position in line, and part of the reason for the lack of police presence, is that the competition for the sneakers is not that fierce. Corteiz’s first Nike sneakers, the Air Max 95s from 2023, retailed for $190 and fetch around $600 on the secondary market. But the Trainer Huarache is a less coveted model, and sneaker resale is slumping in general.
There is money to be made for the resellers, though, who are here, too. Andre Arias, a New York City reseller who will pop out if ever there is a margin to be made in footwear arbitrage, is present, reluctantly.
“I didn’t even wanna do this,” Arias says. “It’s $200 and change retail. It’s 10 degrees in New York City.”
Arias, who goes by Sole Street, says the streets wanted the sneaker, and it’s his job to procure it. He was driving down the FDR, contemplating an exit on Houston, when Corteiz announced the newsstand locations. He sped to pick one up at Iconic Magazines on Mulberry, the one location in Manhattan where the newspapers were available.
Arias is not buying a personal pair—”pony hair is not for a 41-year-old man”—and is wary about ending up with more units of the Corteiz Huaraches than he can move. His plan is to fulfill the preorders he received, looping bodies in and out of the line to grab the stock he needs, and back off from there.
“I don’t really want to be stuck with extra sizes of these,” Arias says. “I don’t have the highest level of confidence.”
Nobody here is anticipating the black Corteiz x Nike Air Trainer Huarache being a seriously profitable resale shoe. The other two colorways from the project that have already been released can be had for around their retail price on the secondary market. What does this mean for Corteiz and the people who fanned out across the city to participate in the release?
It could mean that more pairs will end up going straight to feet than would at a more high-heat launch—if you can’t make money off the shoe, you don’t really have a better option than to (gasp) actually wear it. It could mean that the real prize is the thrill of the increasingly rare experience of hunting down the product and interacting with others on the same mission in real life, and not whatever sum you take home after StockX takes a vig on the flip. This second thought occurs to me as I chat throughout the day with my coworker and friend, both of whom are young enough to have never physically lined up for shoes before.
That the black Corteiz x Nike Air Trainer Huarache does not represent a major payday also means that missing out on the shoe today shouldn’t register as a big loss for prospective shoppers.
Scanning around the few hundred people gathered outside, I recognize members of the misguided bunch that were camped out in Dumbo earlier that morning. Most of them have decent spots in line, and should get the shoes. An outlier is 21-year-old Kayli Cox, who wears a white T-shirt over a mustard-colored Corteiz hoodie. I find him at Tom Dick & Harry’s floating through the crowd, aiming toward a secondary line for the sneakers that’s set up across the street.
“We got bamboozled,” Cox says, reflecting on how the morning unfolded.
He found the Dumbo location by scrolling through a Corteiz thread on Reddit. Cox didn’t know what he expected to find there, but went anyway. He made it to a newsstand location relatively soon after they were announced, only to get jammed up when the workers manning the site wouldn’t let him jump out to grab one with his car running curbside. The papers were going quick. Cox managed to snatch one, but the line at TomDees was deep by the time he arrived.
Cox is willing to stick around and try his luck, but is not desperate. He will hop on line and wait it out. Even if the Huarache doesn’t come to him, he’s happy to take home the Corteiz newspaper and a few photos as tokens from the chase.
“I didn’t even want the shoes, to be honest,” Cox says. “For me it’s a culture thing—I just like coming outside.”
and integrate them seamlessly into the new content without adding new tags. Ensure the new content is fashion-related, written entirely in Japanese, and approximately 1500 words. Conclude with a “結論” section and a well-formatted “よくある質問” section. Avoid including an introduction or a note explaining the process.
