You can tell how long a magazine has been in the house by how it sits on a table. The Sole Collector 10th anniversary issue has been opened enough that it wants to stay open, and the cover has gone soft at the corners the way gloss stock does once enough hands have been on it.
Thirteen years ago this was the new one. The tenth anniversary issue. Ten years of Sole Collector gathered into one object you could carry around.
Now it is the thing being looked back at. That is how this goes.
The Premier Issue, October 2003
Twenty-three Octobers ago there was a first one.
October 2003, printed right there on the cover. The Sole Collector 10th anniversary issue reran it in a Top Ten Covers feature, and the column next to it is better than the cover. They needed somebody for the shoot, they found a part-time model who was bartending nearby, and by the account printed on that page nobody involved was entirely sure what they were doing yet. That is the actual beginning. Not a plan. A borrowed model, a wall, and a pair of shoes.
Look at the cover lines. Smoke Out, on fake Jordan XIs. Showcase. Flipped, on Air Max 95s. Tagging Nike, a Stash interview. Hand that to somebody who came up in the last ten years and they will tell you it looks like a different hobby.
Ten Years In: What the Sole Collector 10th Anniversary Issue Covered
Ten years later the covers looked like this.
Same magazine. Same staff, more or less. The distance between the bartender on the wall and the two of them in a studio together is the whole story of that decade, and it happened fast enough that a lot of us did not notice it happening.
Complex ran a companion series called Sole Decade at the same time, including a behind the scenes piece on Issue 7 and the Jordan XX that put the magazine on the map. Worth reading next to this one.
The Shoes That Carried The Name
Then there are the shoes with the SC name on them.
The collaborations run in the Sole Collector 10th anniversary issue opens on samples, not retail pairs. If you look at the tag hanging off the middle of it you can read a date and a trial number, which is the kind of thing that never makes it into a product photo on purpose.
The 180 Cowboy is the one people still ask about. The interview in the issue puts the run at 180 pairs, and the person saying it hedges with I think. The shoe disagrees. Nick has number 128 of 140, and that same interview says they were numbered on the back, so the real count has been sitting on the heel this whole time.
Which leaves forty pairs to explain. Maybe the production run was 140 and another forty went out as friends and family, which would make both numbers true and neither of them wrong. Maybe it was a figure somebody pulled off the top of their head in 2013 that has been the public number ever since. The person being quoted is Retrokid, so there is an obvious way to settle it. Maybe it is time for a Retrokid interview. What do you think?
The Revis went out through the iPad issue, and by the account in the magazine it sold out inside twenty seconds without the site falling over, which at the time was the more surprising half of that sentence. There is a full run of the collaborations in the archive now if you want to go through them.
The Features, and the Access Behind Them
The features are where the access shows.
A laptop, a couch, a living room. The Yeezy story in that issue runs on people talking about sample trips and secrecy and arguing over an elephant print, and the photo is somebody sitting on a couch. Nothing about it looks like a launch.
That is a shoe resting on the left page. Whoever shot it needed the spread to stay flat and used what was on their foot. Small thing, but it tells you what kind of operation this was.
A whole edition in another country, and a signature written in the margin by somebody who was there. That spread also carries a typo in the first line that made it all the way to print, which is the most reassuring detail in the entire magazine.
Sole Shots, and the People Who Sent Them In
And then there is the section that actually explains why any of it worked.
Nothing else in the Sole Collector 10th anniversary issue does what this page does. A line of guys in tuxedos with their shoes out. A baby asleep in a Jordan beanie. A couple at a wedding, her in a sari, him in Concords. Somebody in the UK. None of those were assignments. People sent them in because the magazine felt like it belonged to them, and it did.
That is the part that does not survive on its own. The shoes on those pages are documented forever. The covers are scanned and reposted every year. The people who mailed in a photo of their wedding shoes are not written down anywhere, and neither is the person who drove two hours to the shop that carried the magazine, or the one who kept every issue in order on a shelf and still has them.
Ten years in, the Sole Collector 10th anniversary issue was the magazine looking back at itself. Thirteen years after that, it is the artifact. We are running Day Ones now for the same reason somebody put together Sole Shots. The shoes are covered. The people are the gap.
So here is what we actually want to know. What is the first issue you remember holding, where did you get it, and is it still in your house somewhere?
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Photos, stories, the pair you still have in the box. This archive grows when you add yours.