Immediately after Zach Kinninger, founder of Los Angeles streetwear label Basketcase, hangs up our call, he’s driving to “the middle of nowhere.” There, he’ll spend the night in his van in a random parking lot. “I don't really know why I’m doing it yet, other than it just feels like the right thing to do,” he says. Life in the backwoods left a permanent impression on the designer's mind, made clear by his brand's biggest-ever New Balance collaboration to date.

Basketcase has transformed the New Balance 204L, a flat-soled retro runner introduced earlier this year, into a hybrid trail shoe where rough nubuck leather replaces sporty mesh and metal lace hooks are lifted from old-school hiking boots. It’s an ode to what he loves most about New Balance — "I like that New Balance is understated,” he says. “Grey, normcore, boring shit.” — and also a reflection of his rural upbringing. 

“I was pulling from what felt nostalgic about living in the middle of nowhere,” says Kinninger. “The beat-up shoes that would sit right by the door when you had to go out and do yard work were a starting point.”

Before moving to Los Angeles when he turned 18, Kinninger grew up in Pine Valley, a tiny town in the San Diego mountains with around 1,700 residents. There, he spent long days outside where he says his father ran the yard like a military camp: “Nothing in my life is as hard as all the yard work I had to do every weekend.”

Today, Kinninger’s reality is very different. The designer has spent almost a decade building Basketcase, which Kinninger started while in college as a small made-to-order T-shirt operation. Back then, he’d take orders via Instagram DM then head to a print shop run out of a local recording studio.

Now, it's launching its first New Balance collaboration to be released worldwide — the duo's previous three sneaker collabs were hyper-limited one-offs. The swelling scale of these New Balance collabs is a surprise even to Kinninger, as is the sportswear giant's willingness to cater to his whims. “I never thought it would come to this point,” he admits. 

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Basketcase's rise came quickly.

The label was officially established In 2019 when Kinninger graduated from college, its printed tees now joined by printed vintage Levi’s jeans. This widening product line earned Basketcase its first real interest from menswear blogs and, thanks to some Instagram Explore Page visibility, even the occasional stylish celebrity. Lil Yachty is a fan of its custom-printed Dickies jacket while skater-turned-actor Evan Mock prefers the graphic sweaters. Eventually, things grew to a point where Kinninger no longer needed to print on old jeans — he wanted to make his own.

Today, denim remains core to Basketcase. “I loved the fact that Cobain would wear repaired jeans and a pair of hiking boots,” says Kinninger. “Grunge is where my taste evolved as I got older.” This reference point shows in Basketcase’s thrashed, muddied denim chore coats and light-washed jeans with both knees thoroughly blown out but it also plays into its New Balance 204L, with fuzzy laces that recall Cobain's famous cardigan and a palette redolent of Nirvana's native Seattle.

Also like Nirvana, Basketcase is no longer just the hometown hero. As the label has expanded, so has its audience. Almost every month since the end of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Basketcase has hosted pop-ups where queues regularly go around the block and a fresh selection of washed-out hoodies and cropped knitwear sells out in hours.

“We've kind of become an events business,” says Kinninger. “We're doing three pop-ups this week. I'm nervous, but it feels important. E-commerce is just numbers on a screen a lot of times, but [the pop-ups] make it real.”

There were, naturally, pop-ups for the latest Basketcase x New Balance collaboration, initially in a parking lot in Kinninger’s old hometown of Pine Valley, then at Basketcase’s LA studio turned store, then at Dover Street Market in New York. The shoes flew, unsurprisingly, but they’re receiving a wider release on the New Balance website come December 19. 

In the meantime, it’s another busy week for the boy from a small town. Maybe even a little too busy — hence the drive to the middle of nowhere.

“I used to work in the yard for hours and let my imaginative thoughts go,” says Kinninger. “Now I find that my life is constantly disrupted. The thing that I would love more than anything is to have a space to just have a delusional [thought].”

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