Name: The surprising history of sneakers | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2021-06-10T18:30:07.000Z
Duration: 4 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Whatever you want to call them, they're everywhere -

Tens of billions of pairs are manufactured every year.

The biggest athletic shoe companies make more in revenue

So how did a piece of rubber, leather and canvas

New sports like croquet and tennis required new footwear

to protect the grass lawns they were played on.

Not long after, sneaker brands started to appear.

Converse's most famous shoe, the All-Star, made its debut in 1917.

Two of the biggest names in the sneaker game, Adidas and Puma,

The Dassler brothers capitalised on something that's common sense today.

If you want people to buy your shoes, get someone famous to wear them.

was set to compete at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin

at a time when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis

The Dassler brothers who, along with many German industrialists,

had joined the Nazi party, took a risk in approaching Owens.

The risk paid off when Owens went on to win four gold medals.

a black man upstaging Hitler's racist ideology on the world stage.

After the war, the brothers split, each to form their own company -

of its founder's first and second names, Adi and Dassler.

His brother Rudi tried the same trick, and called his brand 'Ruda'

before realising that it didn't roll off the tongue.

But the story of sneakers is not just about

Nike sold huge numbers of shoes during the jogging boom of the 1970s.

But when they wanted to move beyond running,

And they found it in basketball legend Michael Jordan,

making him the biggest athletic spokesperson of all time.

The Nike-Jordan partnership was a huge success

generating more than $100 million in sales in its first 12 months,

or around £2.6 billion, in revenue in 2020.

Nike was also adept at spotting other opportunities.

Did you know they paid just $35, or roughly £284, in today's money

And that the famous Nike slogan “Just Do it”

was inspired by the last words, “Let's Do it”,

of murderer Gary Gilmore prior to his 1977 execution?

It's not just athletes - and death row inmates -

In the mid-80s, hip-hop group Run-DMC signed a landmark deal with Adidas

paving the way for many more lucractive partnerships

Today, Kanye West and Rihanna each have their own line of sneakers.

West's collaboration with Adidas, the Yeezy sneaker line,

was valued at over £1.2 billion in 2019 .

But what does our appetite for all these shoes mean for the world?

Environmentally they are something of a disaster.

A single shoe can contain 65 different parts,

and hundreds of different processing steps.

As you can imagine, our shoes stick around in landfills

A rubber sole might take 80 years to biodegrade.

Plastics and synthetics take hundreds more.

Several sneaker companies are experimenting

with recycled materials and more sustainable production methods.

But the legacy of our love affair with sneakers

will be with us for many, many years to come.

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The surprising history of sneakers | BBC Ideas

approach

incredible

process

trick