Jeff Staple and PUMA area teaming up once again to deliver a Suede wrapped in premium materials and next-level storytelling.
The latest takes inspiration from the iconic Yin-Yang symbol, and of course, includes the iconic “Pigeon” logo. Ahead of the STAPLE x PUMA Suede “Create from Division” that releases at Foot Locker on February 10, we had a chance to talk with Jeff Staple about the inspiration, the design process, and how the Yin-Yang inspiration plays a larger role on the shoe than initially anticipated.
Read below to learn more about what Staple had to say, exclusively at SoleSavy.
SoleSavy: You’ve worked with PUMA and the PUMA Suede plenty of times in the past. What keeps bringing you back to the silhouette?
Jeff Staple: The first time I worked with the PUMA Suede was a made-in-Japan edition that was super limited and super expensive. It was a $250 Suede made in Japan. It was from that point forward that I wanted to create this storyline, for myself, to turn the Suede into somewhat of a Levi’s 501 or the white Hanes t-shirt: the perfect canvas that I can keep remixing, evolving, and morphing.
It’s been a lot of fun. I can’t even count how many we’ve down now. I think we’ve done half a dozen to maybe 10. Sometimes we’ll bring in a partner like atmos or something. But overall, to me, it’s a perfect blank canvas. It’s one of the icons of sneaker culture. If you look at the Dunk, the Air Jordan 1, Air Force 1, Club C, Superstar, Stan Smith, and the Suede, these are the architectural pillars that all of the sneaker culture sits on. Those are the foundation of sneaker culture.
To use one of them and take it as a blank canvas is dope.
The other thing about the Suede is its intrinsic connection to hip-hop culture. Maybe the Suede and the Superstar are the most directly tied to hip-hop culture. When you think of a DJ on two Technic 1200s or a b-boy spinning on a piece of cardboard in the street, that person is wearing PUMA Suedes. That’s also what I love about it; being a New Yorker and being hugely inspired by hip-hop culture, it’s a mainstay — a staple in hip-hop culture.
SS: The colorway is about duality, clashing forces with its Yin-Yang inspiration. What makes this shoe and the story so important not just for sneakers and the state of the industry but society at large? I feel like we’re at a turning point on a new wave.
JS: We started to bring in this idea of using what the Yin-Yang symbol represents. Being inspired by it and of Asian descent, I wanted to figure out how to imbue my heritage into a product.
To each their own, but some people like to hammer home their heritage, ethnicity, culture and fly the flag proudly. I’m all with that; the only negative of that is that when you do that, you are also alienating people that are not part of your culture. Again, to each their own, but I like to secretly infect my culture into people. I think it’s more powerful that there can be some person out there who hates Chinese people but loves Staple, and I’m lowkey backdoor infecting them. “Damn, this brand I’ve spent $10,000 on is from a Chinese person? Shit!” I like that way better than me saying “I’m a Chinese brand” and someone saying, “Well, I’m not messing with your brand.” I’d rather go espionage style.
Early on, we were trying to figure out ways to embed the Asian heritage through the use of the Yin-Yang symbol, which is pretty commonly adapted now but give it a new meaning with its duality and its balance. And frankly, we were doing this a year before everything from the last two years: the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders hate. All of this started happening.
When you design footwear, you’re designing that a year in advance. So as this is happening, our Yin-Yang collection is about to come out and people are like, “you dropped this at the perfect time.” I wish it wasn’t done in response to that, but it made it such a deeper symbol.
We’ve done the Yin-Yang a few times already, especially in conjunction with Foot Locker. To have the platform of Foot Locker be the stage for something like this, is no better.
Yin-Yang is dope because it’s soft and hard, it’s good and evil, it’s positive and negative. It’s telling you, and this is what blew my mind when I started deep diving into Yin-Yang, the point of it that there’s good and evil, positive and negative. The point is that you have to accept the whole thing. When I used to look at the Yin-Yang symbol, I used to see the black and white and how they’re sort of fighting each other. The circle, the whole thing, you actually can’t separate it. You can’t have good without evil, you can’t have positive without negative, you can’t have order without disorder. When people get their heads down, this is where good shit comes from. It’s life and death.
This particular drop is inspired by coming out of the chaos. Coming out of chaotic times. It’s about finding balance out of it.
SS: You mentioned it earlier, but when these unfortunate events started happening, you’re starting to think, “Oh, this is more and more relevant.” Within the team or your process, did the message ever intensify? Was there a different approach to the rollout? Was there anything you thought would be pragmatically different after everything that went down?
JS: When it came down to the marketing of the last drop with Foot Locker, we ended up doing the lookbook in Chinatown. Chinatowns all over the world were getting decimated because people thought, because COVID-19 came from China, somehow if you go to Chinatown in your town, you’ll catch COVID.
We did our shoot in Chinatown; we were trying to cast sorta senior citizen models to be in the campaign because there were a lot of attacks on senior citizens. My mom ended up being in the last campaign. So, it’s my mom doing tai chi representing this Yin-Yang shoe in Chinatown. That was a deliberate move being reactive to what was happening at the time.
SS: The shoe is designed exclusively for Foot Locker. As you’ve mentioned, Foot Locker is such a big platform. Every year, it seems like Foot Locker is doing a better job of tapping into sneaker culture with creators and messaging. For you, especially being such a key figure for so many reasons with so many brands, when you hear Foot Locker and Jeff Staple, what’s that thought process like for you with this pair specifically?
JS: The word that came to mind when the opportunity came to me was access. For decades now, I’ve been dropping shoes at the most Tier 0, Quick-Strike locations. They sell out, and they’re on StockX. It’s great for the halo, but when you talk about accessibility, how am I getting to that kid in Kalamazoo, or Detroit, or Tulsa?
As you can see, with a lot of the stuff that I do, there’s a lot of thought and design and concept that goes into it. Oftentimes, you can spend two years on a project. But that two-year-long process boils down to one Instagram post and a caption that a kid looks at for maybe five seconds. If anything, if I can change the access points and allow more people to engage with the product through a trusted source like Foot Locker, that’s a powerful thing.
If you’re a musician and you’re one of the greatest musicians of all time, but you’re only playing at Blue Note Jazz Club one night a week and all of a sudden Tower Records comes in and wants to put you in every city, there’s nothing wrong with taking that core of what you’re doing on a small level, plugging a massive speaker system to it, and broadcasting to the world.
Frankly, Foot Locker, as it pertains to sneaker culture, has been in it since day one. I started doing part-time random jobs when I was 12 and a half years old. Most of that paycheck went to Foot Locker in East Brunswick mall in New Jersey where I grew up. I would take that paycheck and look at the wall and see what I could get.
Kids today don’t remember a time when you walk into a sneaker store and look at the wall emdash no magazine or influence or blog told you what to buy. You had to look at the whole wall and decide for yourself what you thought was fly. They would come and size you in that metal device and measure your foot. Now, you walk in with your phone to show them what you want and they say “sold out,” and you walk out of the store.
Foot Locker was a huge part of my upbringing and me being a sneakerhead. It’s a dream come true. I’ve created a t-shirt brand out of art school, and now Foot Locker is hitting me up to sell my creation. It’s a crazy moment.
SS: You brought up a good point about access. And at SoleSavy, that’s our mission to get sneakers into the hands of those who really want them, who really care about the culture. To your point, sometimes artists think working with a bigger brand or platform, their message and product might get diluted, and it won’t be the same. With Don C, Melody Ehsani, yourself, and others, it’s still their product. What’s the design process for you and Foot Locker and how’s that relationship?
JS: So freeing and open. Some would think that if you’re working with a multi-billion dollar corporation, they’ll be heavy-handed. Foot Locker is smart enough to note who are the authenticators and true voices of the culture. Foot Locker is smart to know that if they brought in all these amazing people, and then said, “this is what we want you to do,” don’t even bring them in. The point is, “let’s bring these people in and let them tell us to interpret sneaker and street culture.” Then, maybe Foot Locker can learn from them.
That takes humbleness, removing your own ego, your own predetermination of who you think you are to do that. For you to allow someone else to speak and let them enact their own ideas, that’s true power. That humbleness is true power.
Frankly, this isn’t for all artists and creatives. Only creators that have established their own flag pole of their own identity could pull this off. At the end of the day, Foot Locker is a big machine. If you don’t have that confidence in your voice and in your position in this culture, it is easy to get swept up and say yes when you don’t really want to say yes and be firm about your intentions. With us, we’ve been at this for a couple of decades ourselves. We’ve architected this subculture that is now like pop culture.
I can see how if you’re an up-and-coming designer and a huge brand like Foot Locker calls you, you might be hesitant, might want to wait till you have more confidence in your voice — there’s nothing wrong with that approach, either. I’m not talking about selling out or anything. Can you stand on your own two feet and defend your intentions before you engage with a large organization?
SS: Talk to me about the colorway and its design cues.
JS: With it being near Lunar New Year and further referencing Asian culture, we did a very Asian-vibe tassel that comes on the side of every shoe. There’s a Yin-Yang version of our pigeon on the tongue, which we’ve never done before. “Create from Choas” tied in with typography. The tongue has a split look going on that extends on top of the toe box; the whole shoe looks like it was sliced in half and reassembled with two different suedes. There’s a flat and hairy suede on either side.
When you go to the toe box, that split continues. It comes from that idea of creating from chaos and division.
Someone commented on the Instagram tease that you always make drip so wearable. That’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten. Even if you think about the OG “Pigeon” SB Dunk, it’s a grail shoe. But it’s not some crazy artwork, splat-over thing. When you think about it, they’re very wearable shoes. I’m a sneakerhead at heart, and I’m all about wearing your kicks versus putting your kicks on a mantle.
This is the challenging part of being a designer. The shoe needs to be wearable, and timeless, but something about it needs to hit so that when you walk up to a sneakerhead, they’re like “oh my god, he’s got those on.” An “if you know, you know” thing. Or even if a layman sees them and is like “something is different about those,”; that’s something I always strive for.
If you had 18 different paintbrushes and 35 different fonts and different logos and threw it all one, it’s actually easy to make a shoe that’s “outstanding.” The OG dunk is damn-near 17, 18 years old now. How do you make something that transpires decades? The PUMA Suede just had its 50th anniversary. How do you make something that transcends generations?
SS: It’s fitting that we’re talking about a Yin-Yang-inspired shoe and your entire ethos is a culmination of polar opposites. It’s that premium, top-tier design, but it’s not grease in a hot pan — it’s timeless. We’ve been talking about a series of full-circle moments, and at the same time, the Yin-Yang captures what Staple is and who Jeff Staple is.
JS: Hot and timeless is really hard. Hot and timely is easy. Timeless, classic, and boring are easy. Hot and timeless; that’s a good design challenge for any creative no matter what you do: photography, sculpture, fashion, footwear. That’s really hard to do.
The latest STAPLE x PUMA Suede “Create from Division” will be available at Foot Locker starting on February 10. As always, our sneaker monitors and release day strategy will have members ready for drop day. Stay tuned to SoleSavy for more sneaker-related news from your favorite brands and retailers, including Staple Design and Foot Locker.
