As seen on Unboxed Issue 62. The Unboxed newsletter covers the most important stories of the week across sneakers, sports, and fashion straight to your inbox on Mondays.
We’ve all been drawn in by the social currency of “hype” before. I know plenty of times where I’ve seen a pair of sneakers that I didn’t particularly rock with until I saw someone I respect in the world of fashion rock them and that’s totally okay. That’s part of the culture, when you see your dawg with some heat on you’re supposed to say “YOOOOOOOOO, where you find them at!?”
That’s the impetus of any collecting community, the mutual admiration and respect of another’s collection is supposed to inspire you and engender you to other people in that community. That is the opposite of what HypeTags is doing. HypeTags, a digital receipt that tracks the StockX price in real time, are the culmination of the over-commodification of the world of sneakers. While signs point toward this being a joke, it’s not far off from the clout olympics sneakers have become to many. It’s totally fine to want people to notice your new sneakers, that’s ingrained in human consciousness, we live to get fresh and stand out but a HypeTag wouldn’t be asking you to notice the sneakers, they’d be asking you to notice how much those sneakers are “worth.”
In fact, in the TikTok wherein they debuted the creator mentioned how his invention was spurred by his need for non-sneakerheads to know how much he spent on his Fragment 3s. This isn’t fostering respect from a welcoming community, this is flexing on unwitting participants and under the wrong circumstances, endangering the wearer. Sneakerheads are in every corner of the world, if the drip is there somebody is gonna put respect on it no matter where you are. If the person in line next to you in the self-checkout doesn’t care that you’re wearing $700 sneakers, that flashing tag won’t make them.
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