The story of Nike Dunk SB Low Staple "NYC Pigeon"

It's wrong thinking that it was Jeff Staple with his Nike Dunk SB Low Staple "NYC Pigeon" that elevated sneakers to a cult. What happened in February 2005, however, is undoubtedly a turning point that transformed the passion for sneakers and collectors, from nerd fetishism to mainstream phenomenon, absorbed even outside the close circle of fans. Pigeon has the merit of having created a ferment that gave birth to the phenomenon of camp out and to the race for the limited edition, the definition of Hype even before this word had such a clear meaning.
But let's start from the beginning, who is Jeff Staple? How did a shoe with a so annoying and universally hated animal to be the origin of the resell game?

A Lower East Side graphic designer

Jeff Staple started as a graphic designer, working with various magazines, with a strong passion for silkscreen printing shorts. Jeff NG's career in the fashion world underwent a turnaround in March 1997, when entering SoHo's Triple Five Soul shop wearing one of his homemade tee, the store manager took note and commissioned Jeff the first order of 12 Tees. From that moment on, Staple's entrepreneurial success took off, turning his small production into a complete men's line - the Staple Pigeon - launched in 1997 and immediately respected in New York. After the first order, in 2002 Jeff founded a creative agency and, in 2002, he opened Reed Space, a store where he organized events and art exhibitions.

Nike noted Jeff's work and proposed him to be part of the projects for the anniversary of the Dunk, the basketball line born in 2002. Nike would have presented the "City Pack", composed of 4 sneakers dedicated to Tokyo, London, Paris and New York. Jeff was commissioned to make the NYC model.
The best sneaker of the moment, for the best brand of the moment, dedicated to the most trending city in the world: here the story of the Nike Dunk SB Low Staple "NYC Pigeon" starts.

Machete, knives and thug

The design created by the Reed Space wanted to combine the world of skateboarding and the soul of New York City in a single item. Jeff and his team decided that nothing like pigeons would best represent the Big Apple vibe, a photograph of everyday life that doesn't connect to the city if you don't actually live there.
The colorway was inspired by the colors of the bird: three different grays, black and white areas (the swoosh), orange sole like the legs and upper in nubuck, to recreate the softness of the feathers.
The shoe was the last released of the super limited series "City Pack": jusr 150 pairs were made, 30 for each of the 5 shops in NYC (Rival, Supreme, Recon, KCDC and Reed Space).
However, only in Jeff's shop in Manhattan, the sneakers were numbered which made the model even more exclusive and generated what happened then the following days.

Staple noticed that something big was about to happen when he left work, the night before the drop, when a dozen were already camping at the 151 Orchard Street.

The next day there were 150 people and the police was helping a 140-kilo bouncer to contain the crowd, wilding to buy the Nike Dunk SB at a retail price of $300.
The NYPD arrested about twenty people, including the Lower East Side thugs, lurking on street corners ready to rob the lucky ones who managed to get the Pigeons, let them out in advance from the back of the store and escorted by police to taxis and vehicles. 

However, the moment that cemented the notoriety of the Dunk to mainstream recognition is February 23, 2005, the day after the release.
The New York Post headlined "Sneaker frenzy" on the front page, recognizing the phenomenon generated by the Pigeons as a force and relevance never attributed to any sneaker. On the seventh page of the tabloid, Rachel Sklar and Leonard Greene reported the first statements of Nico Reyes - Reed store manager - and the fact that sneaker had already reached a value above 1000$ on Ebay, that was still in its early days. The story shook Nike, especially since knives, machetes and baseball bats were found outside the store. Someone thought that everything had been orchestrated from the beginning by Jeff, a thesis that was reported even in the following days always on the New York Post.

From that day the interest in sneakers increased, and so the secondary market was that of counterfeit shoes, before that it was not necessary to obtain that type of items. A cultural phenomenon that involved art and music in an increasingly interdependent way also started from Nike Pigeon by Jeff Staple. I Have Pop, a Dutch artist and designer, in June 2005 produced a series of guerrilla works outside of sneaker shops like Undefeated, Solebox or DQM, while Dave White revisited Nike's Dunks in an expressionist key. Also in the music world, Travis Scott, Frank Ocean and A$AP Rocky have been spotted wearing rare models of the SB line.

The Pigeons returned in the "What the Dunk" of 2007, the mash-up born to celebrate the 5 years of the Dunk SB's, then in 2017 in the black version, which revived the hype generated in Manhattan on February 22, 2005. The Pigeons are back again at the beginning of 2019, in the "Panda" colorway, with white and black upper and green details on the tongue and in the heel. In Italy, Staple Pigeon is commercialized by Nitro Distribution, recently the brand unveiled a new collabo with Coca-Cola.