After works of art, jewelry or more recently tweets, the auction world seems to have found a promising new niche: unique shoes.
A pair of Nike Air Yeezy 1 sneakers worn by their inspiration, rapper Kanye West, was sold for $ 1.8 million to a specialized investment platform, announced Monday Sotheby's, which organized the sale, which is triple the previous record for sneakers.
This record for a pair of sports shoes, broken several times in recent years, has so far been held by Nike Air Jordan 1s, which sold for $ 615,000 at a sale organized by Christie's in mid-August 2020. These black high top sneakers (see photo at the top of the article), unique model, are the very first pair of Yeezy presented publicly, at the feet of Kanye West, during the 2008 Grammy Awards ceremony. era of a prototype. The resulting model did not go on sale until April 2009.
This is a new sign of the vitality of this market, which was only a niche ten years ago and is now of interest to the general public as well as to leading collectors.
According to analysts at the financial firm Cowen, the global collectible sneaker resale market could be worth $ 30 billion by 2030.
Rapper and influential designer
The precious shoes were acquired by Rares, a platform launched at the end of March by 40-year-old former professional football player Gerome Sapp.
It allows individuals to invest in very rare sneakers, which they could not have bought on their own.
Concretely, Rares acquires a collector's pair, then carries out a sort of IPO on the platform.
Each individual can then buy shares of that pair, as he would buy shares of a listed company.
It is then possible to resell these shares on the platform.
The price varies, as for a traditional exchange, depending on supply and demand.
The price offered by Rares exceeds Sotheby's estimate, which was over $ 1 million.
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The pair of Air Yeezy 1 were bought through a private sale: the auction house, here Sotheby's, puts the potential buyer and the seller directly in contact, in this case the New York collector Ryan Chang .
There is no auction process and the buyer preserves his anonymity, unless he wishes to make himself known publicly, as was the case with Rares.
For Brahm Wachter, responsible for streetwear and new collectibles at Sotheby's, the price reached “is a testament to the fact that Kanye (West) is one of the most influential designers of our time”.
Before collaborating with the rapper, producer and designer, Nike had baptized shoes only in the name of famous sportsmen.
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The Air Yeezy 1 was finally released, in a limited series, in 2009, followed by the Air Yeezy 2 in 2012. The Air Yeezy 1 is currently trading between $ 2,000 and $ 4,000 for most pairs.
The following year, Kanye West, ex-candidate for the White House, ended his partnership with Nike, deeming his share of the income insufficient.
The artist then partnered with Adidas in 2014, to create a dedicated brand Yeezy.
Huge popular success, it generated nearly $ 1.7 billion in revenue in 2020, according to an internal note from UBS bank, cited by Bloomberg.
If he is not the designer of the Air Yeezy 1, Kanye West has had a lot of influence on the design of the shoe.
