Every so often a project gets to be purely selfish, made for the love of it with no bigger mandate, and those are sometimes the ones that come out the most honest. This is that shoe.
The story is Sacramento. Growing up there, the Kings were the squad, and the Jason Williams and Chris Webber tandem was the most exciting duo a kid could have watched in those years. White Chocolate passing the ball behind his elbow, C-Webb finishing everything, a team that played like a highlight reel before highlight reels were a constant. If that was your team, you remember exactly how electric those nights felt.
The design pulled straight from that well. The glossy purple base took its inspiration from JWill’s classic Hyperflights, which is the most Sacramento reference imaginable. But the material underneath is the real story. It used an unmolded sheet of Foamposite, which had not really been done up to that point, giving the shoe this loud, wet, flashy look in person that matched the Hyperflight energy it was chasing.
There’s a deeper personal thread too. The name and the build nod to the lineage of shoes that ran together for one kid on a high school basketball team, the Hyperflight and the Flight 89 worn on the court, the Zoom Glove in the mix, all of it blending in memory into the idea of the Flight Club. That is what the shoe is really about. Not one model, but the whole stack of shoes that meant something during the years you were actually hooping.
It is loud and unapologetic, and it was supposed to be. A shoe made because somebody wanted it to exist, tied to a team and a city and a set of court memories that don’t show up on anyone else’s list. The best selfish projects work because the specificity is the point. You are not designing for everyone. You are designing for the kid you used to be.Array
Who was your version of the Kings, the team and the duo that made you fall for the game, and what were you wearing while you watched them?Array
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Photos by Nick DePaula
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