Eight Hundred Pairs

My name is Marcel and I own three pairs of sneakers. One of them has a sole that’s delaminating in a way that suggests it’s filing for separation. Realistically, I own two pairs of sneakers.

Julia owns eight hundred.

Eight hundred pairs. The number doesn’t shrink no matter how many times I write it out. Julia, a collector from Berlin who goes by the name Sneakerqueen online, has a relationship with athletic footwear that left the territory of hobby a long time ago and entered something closer to curatorial obsession. Adidas Originals flew her—along with four other collectors from around the world—to their headquarters in Herzogenaurach, a Bavarian town that functions as a kind of sneaker holy site for anyone who grew up worshipping at the altar of the three stripes. I understand the gesture. You don’t find people who care that much about an object and then leave them at home.

The thing about sneakers is that they occupy this strange space between sportswear and art object, between utility and nostalgia. I get it completely. I’ve loved them my whole life in the way you love something you can never quite possess enough of. I just lack the discipline, and the closet space. Julia apparently has both in quantities that make the rest of us look like we’re not even trying.

I’m saving up. At my current rate I’ll catch her record in about thirty years—by which point she’ll either have ten thousand pairs or she’ll have moved on to something else entirely. Knitting, maybe. Or chips shaped like celebrities. Or climbing mountains in animal costumes. Who knows. The gap between us isn’t really the point. The point is that someone out there loves something enough to own eight hundred of them, and that’s a beautiful and slightly unhinged thing to witness.