The Ritual of the Drop

The premise of a sneaker event is always the same: something is being revealed that you were supposed to want before you’d seen it. Sneakersnstuff—the Stockholm-born retailer that grew into one of the more respected names in European sneaker culture—was opening its Berlin store, and Nike was there to help inaugurate it with a new silhouette: the LunarCharge, a shoe built by pulling references from five existing models and stitching them into something new. Erik Fagerlind, one of SNS’s founders, was on hand to introduce it. The venue was the store’s back space, which hadn’t officially opened yet. A show inside a preview inside an exclusive—sneaker culture does nested exclusivity better than almost anyone.

The shoe itself was interesting in the way that design synthesis is interesting. Lunarlon cushioning in the sole, a neoprene upper borrowed from the Air Flow, the sock-fit construction of the Air Presto, the lacing geometry of the Air Max 90, the silhouette pulled from the Air Current. Whether you read that as clever or exhausting probably depends on how closely you’ve been watching Nike work through its own archive. The result was clean. The Bassgang played. Sneaker obsessives from across the country were present and apparently delighted.

What these events actually sell is the feeling that you were there before the thing became available—that brief window when it exists but hasn’t been distributed yet. Sneakersnstuff has always understood that, which is why their openings feel like something rather than nothing. The LunarCharge was a good-looking shoe. The Berlin store was a good-looking reason to throw a party about it.