Michael Jordan changed the way basketball shoes were perceived when he signed his iconic Nike NKE, +2.98% deal in 1984 and debuted the Air Jordan 1. Basketball shoes became so popular that they soon outgrew the court and were being worn as everyday shoes.
A lot of people are still choosing to wear athletic shoes, but not high performance basketball shoes. What happened?“This is the culmination of the athleisure trend, where we are wearing athletic inspired footwear and apparel but we don’t intend to use them for sport,” Matt Powell, Senior Industry Advisor at NPD, told MarketWatch.
“The consumer is really in charge of fashion trends,” Powell said. “They’re dictating to the brands what they want.” But is the movement away from bigger athletic shoes the only reason people stopped buying basketball sneakers? “At the Beijing Olympics Nike had the Kobe 4, LeBron 7 and Kd 4 and those models had a lot of great themes, great colorways, great storytelling and really took off as those guys were accomplishing a lot on the court,” DePaula told MarketWatch. “That was the post-Jordan resurgence for Nike basketball.”
Too much video gaming and internet. Kids don’t play pickup anymore much. When I was a kid, I lived for hoops.