“A form of indigestion”: have sneakers finally drained us?

Sitting at a table on a terrace on the Grands Boulevards, Eddy, 38, rolls up his combat pants so they hang just right. Namely, behind the tongue of his Air Jordan XI. A privileged witness to "the golden years of sneakers," the hotel employee now conjugates his love in the imperfect tense. He chatters like a repentant prophesying the decadence to come. "I've given up on the sneaker game!" sighs the bearded man with a bald head, who boasts a collection of at least forty pairs of sneakers, mostly purchased between 2005 and 2020. "I knew the time when you toured specialty stores to pick up limited editions, sometimes you even traveled ! Then, online sales revolutionized the thing." Today, we're in a predatory system, where sneakerheads [basketball enthusiasts, editor's note] find themselves hustling at 4 a.m. for a pair. All this so that the most stylish models no longer circulate on the streets, but in museums. It disgusts me," he grumbles. A feeling shared by Gilles Fichteberg, co-founder of the advertising agency Rosa Paris, an inveterate collector of Air Max Is. "There's definitely a form of indigestion. I found myself eyeing a model in collaboration with Kith, thinking that there are too many. What's the point? They're too expensive!" Why this paradigm shift? "I think that structurally, our societies are entering an era of the end of abundance. With <