Sole Collector x Nike Huarache 2K5 ‘Boston Cowboy’

This is one of the very first SC shoes to ever release to the public, which makes it a kind of origin point for everything that came after. Before the long list of event blowouts and limited packs, there was the very first Niketown event in Boston on August 19th of 2005, a battle of collections with some of the rarest samples anyone had seen, and a Huarache 2K5 styled up by former creative director Retrokid for sale at the end of it.

There were actually two. A safe forest green and white Celtics version in a nice suede, and then the loud one. The loud one got the alias Cowboy, a name borrowed from Chris Scheller, the guy on the Nike side the team worked with, and that nickname ended up christening a whole series of shoes that followed.

The colorway has a joke baked into it that you only get if you spent time in the city. The orange and yellow were a play on the fact that Boston felt permanently buried in construction back then, the Big Dig and roadwork everywhere you looked, exactly those traffic-cone hues. Then a third color, blue, got tossed in for contrast for no reason anyone could fully explain, kind of out of the blue. Somehow it all mashed together and worked.

The other goal was to block the 2K5 in a way nobody could copy. The model was on NIKEiD at the time, so the team ran the rand all the way to the top and moved the Swoosh placement around, things you simply could not do yourself on iD or find on any in-line pair. A synthetic upper for the Cowboy, suede for the green one. Small moves that made it unmistakably a Sole Collector shoe and not something you could fake at home.

This was peak gaudy is good, the early mantra that guided so much of the work in those years, and this pair damn sure qualified. Loud on purpose, a little ridiculous on purpose, exactly the energy the brand was running on before anyone had a formula. The line in Boston was long, the energy was real, and it paved the way for every event that came next.

Looking back, this shoe matters less for its design than for what it represents. The start. One of the first times the community put something into the world that people could actually buy, with a sense of humor and a willingness to be loud.

Were you around for the early Niketown releases, and what was the first SC shoe you ever managed to get your hands on?

Gallery

Photos by Nick DePaula

Part of The Complete Guide to Sole Collector Collaborations