Sole Collector x AND1 Onslaught ‘Sole Bar’

AND1 does not come up enough anymore, and that is a shame, because for a stretch the brand was woven right into hoops culture. The mixtapes, the streetball era, some of basketball’s most memorable and least polished moments. If you were watching playground ball get its own mythology, AND1 was in the middle of it.

This Onslaught came together for the 7.7.7 event in Los Angeles, the same day that produced a whole set of collabs built around one shared palette, black, purple, and red. The team split up the work, one taking a Reebok Ventilator, another a K-Swiss SI-18, and the Onslaught, the lone basketball model of the bunch, getting built alongside AND1’s marketing director Jerome Jackson. It carries a little extra weight because it was the first official SC collab one of the team ever got to lead. You remember your first one.

Since it was the LA shoe and the only hoops model in the group, it leaned Laker. Purple took over the upper, with red contrast stitching to tie it back to the rest of the 7.7.7 family and yellow as the pop color, on the AND1 and Onslaught branding and on the full length TPU spring plate that was the model’s big new innovation. The original plan was a rich purple suede on the overlays, but Jerome pushed for a lighter, faster synthetic that fit the Onslaught’s performance look better, and he was right. He also threw in the touch that made the shoe, a repeating all over S pattern across the outsole, a last second surprise that pulled the whole thing together.

It is a near perfect artifact of the all over print era, that stretch we can all admit got run completely into the ground before it was over. But here it works, partly because of the model and partly because of the city it was made for.

Only 72 pairs were made. The detail worth holding onto, though, is not the count. It is that most of the people who got them actually wore them. That sounds like a strange thing to celebrate, but anyone who has watched limited pairs disappear into deadstock storage knows exactly why it matters. A shoe that gets worn is a shoe that gets to be part of people’s actual lives.

That is the Sole Bar spirit in a nutshell. A pop up, a performance model nobody expected to see done up like this, a small run, and a crowd that put them on and beat them up the way good shoes are supposed to get beaten up.

Were you an AND1 head back in the day, and did you wear your limited pairs or save them, be honest?

Photos by Nick DePaula

Part of The Complete Guide to Sole Collector Collaborations