Airei's Indigo-Dyed ASICS Shoes Are More Art Than Sneaker (EXCLUSIVE)
AIREI and ASICS make art, not sneakers. Okay, they make sneakers but the end product is too craft-conscious to be lumped together with footwear convention.
AIREI's third and final ASICS sneaker collab epitomizes that proposition.
Again limited-edition and again exclusive to a Dover Street Market location, AIREI's Concept by AIREI ASICS GEL-Quantum Kinetic shoe is handmade in the exact way that typical sneakers are not.
To whit, AIREI's new ASICS GEL-Quantum sneaker is again wrapped in khadi gauze, a supremely important Indian fabric: Khadi, an organic fiber handspun and woven without electricity, was one of Gandhi's tools of anti-colonialist resistance.
AIREI, an LA-based indie label part of Dover Street Market's incubation program, often incorporates khadi and other human-touch materials into its ready-to-wear collections.
The slowmade process, delicate handfeel and exquisite imperfections are core to the appeal, telling a story that goes beyond trend and even fashion itself.
Atop a pair of ASICS sneakers, khadi represents an innate contrast that AIREI probed in its prior two ASICS partnerships, which previously aligned in both timing and ideology with concurrent art festivals like Frieze.
AIREI's first team-up coated ASICS sneakers in plaster, obscuring the running shoe beneath until the material uniquely cracked off through wear. The second encouraged buyers to light their shoes on fire, burning away the khadi to, again, personalize the previously hidden technical sneaker.
Core to each project is that disparity between lab-developed, function-first footwear and handmade craft.
And the artistic approach was underscored by the AIREI x ASICS projects' limited scope, with the shoes sold in hand-signed editions of 50.
AIREI and ASICS' third collaboration repeats the process with an additional step: hand-dyed blue hues "in honor of Japan’s rich history of indigo," AIREI says in a press release.
Not only is it a nod to ASICS' Japanese heritage, but it aligns with the collaborative ASICS sneakers' launch at Dover Street Market Ginza on August 2 for $265.
