"Why yes, my overpriced fake leather nostolgiabait shoes that have nothing in it, dont come in wide, and gives people pla tar fasciitis is muxh better than the other overpriced fake leather hipsterbait shoe!!!!"
And then kids will literally screech in the damn store if they dont get their shitty nike shoe, becayse its about the NAME of the BRAND!!!
FUCK OFF SNEAKERHEADS YOU ALL SUCK!!!
A sneaker is more or less a basketball shoe and adjacent styles of athletic footwear.
Sneaker collecting started to become a thing in the 70s in the Hip Hop scene in NYC. Sneakers gave people the ability to easily customize their shoes to match a personal style, painting them, dying them etc. In the 80s you got the Nike's Air Jordans, which blew up the scene. You'd have a lot of shoe companies working with different celebs to drive the popularity of the Sneaker. It rapidly takes on the properties of a status symbol.
Now you have Sneakerheads, which is basically a consumer identity that is willing to spend a lot of time and money to ensure that they have a large collection of sneakers that many don't even wear. As with many things, I think there is something cool in there that was ruined by hyper consumptive capitalism.
People are using shoes as funko pops?
More or less, its got different idiosyncrasies but definitely a lot of overlap.