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Twenty-three Octobers ago there was a first issue.
We know the month because it is printed on the cover, but we only had that cover in front of us because the tenth anniversary issue reran it in a Top Ten Covers feature. That issue came out in 2013. It has been on a shelf with other issues ever since. This week we opened it up…
The 10th anniversary issue, 2013.
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The premier issue, October 2003.
October 2003, right there under the masthead. The column beside it tells the story of that shoot, and it is not a glamorous one. But like every story, the beginning is always the most challenging. And reading its origins makes preserving it for future generations even more important.
They needed somebody for the cover, they found a part-time model who was bartending nearby, and by the account printed on the page nobody involved was completely sure what they were doing yet.
Look at the cover lines. Smoke Out, on fake Jordan XIs. Flipped, on Air Max 95s. Tagging Nike, a Stash interview. Ten years after that, the same magazine was putting Michael Jordan and Tinker Hatfield in the same frame.
The Air Max 180 Cowboy. The issue says 180 pairs. The shoe says 140.
In between there are the shoes that carried Sole Collector name. The Penny crates. The Zoom Revis that went out through the iPad issue and was gone in about twenty seconds. The samples in the collaborations opener still have their factory trial tags hanging off them.
And the Cowboy 180, the one I put in the book, which is worth stopping on. The interview in the issue puts the run at 180 pairs, and the person saying it hedges with I think. The shoe disagrees. I have number 128 of 140, and that same interview says they were numbered on the back, so the real count has been sitting on the heel this whole time.
Which leaves forty pairs to explain. Maybe the production run was 140 and another forty went out as friends and family, which would make both numbers true and neither of them wrong. Maybe it was a figure somebody pulled off the top of their head in 2013 that has been the public number ever since. Maybe it was a simple mistake. The person being quoted is Retrokid, so there is an obvious way to settle it. Maybe it is time for a Retrokid interview. What do you think?
And then, near the back, the section that explains why any of it worked.
Sole Shots. Reader photos, sent in unprompted.
A line of guys in tuxedos with their shoes out. A baby asleep in a Jordan beanie. A couple at a wedding, her in a sari, him in Concords. Somebody in the UK. None of those were assignments. People sent them in because the magazine felt like it belonged to them, and it did.
We put all fourteen photos up on the site, page by page, with everything we could read off them.
One more thing while you are here. The shoes on those pages are documented forever. The people who mailed in a photo of their wedding shoes are not written down anywhere, and neither is whoever drove two hours to the shop that carried the magazine. That is the entire reason we are running Day Ones, an interview series for the people who were actually there.
So tell us. What is the first issue you remember holding, where did you get it, and is it still somewhere in your house?
Hit reply. We read all of them.
Forward this to a friend who was there so they can take a trip down memory lane.
