Here is 6-month-vintage Archer Brooke, in a teeny pair of Nike Air Jordan sneakers and shredded denim, sitting next to a basketball for length reference. Here he is once more, dressed head to toe in a bandana-print sweatsuit, swinging between his father’s sizable kicks. Here he’s one more time, captured in what ought to be mere weeks after his start, enjoying a catatonic newborn rest. Above him is a photoshopped Peanuts thought bubble. Inside sits a crisp Nike high-pinnacle, an omen for things to return.
Chris Brooke, Archer’s photographer, stylist, and father, estimates his non-public sneaker series sits around 50. It’s an obsession that began inside the mid-’90s on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Chris’s father (and Archer’s grandfather) would make VHS tapes of the Chicago Bulls games broadcasting late into the South Pacific night so that Chris may want to watch and obsess over them time and again. “I desired to be like Mike,” he remembers. “So footwear had been a massive part of that.”
It handiest made the experience that he’d ruin his first youngster into the circle of relatives lifestyle. Chris’s Instagram, “The Sneakerhead Dad,” stars Archer and his unexpectedly developing streetwear cloth wardrobe. For the uninitiated, the terms “streetwear” and “hypebeast” typically check with the loud, jagged, juvenile designs pioneered through skater and skater-adjacent apparel brands like Supreme, A Bathing Ape, and Off White. (“Sneakerhead” is barely one of a kind. That phrase is used to describe everybody who collects several athletic footwear.) Aesthetically, streetwear is a concoction of hip-hop cockiness, ecstasy provider sleaze, and a touch bit of name-emblem athleisure, all cranked to their most profane.
The style toiled in relative obscurity for years till around 2016, while bona fide superstars like Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Justin Bieber started out weaving the inspect their’ fits (brief for outfits, the universally agreed-upon label for any streetwear ensemble). Today, streetwear is ready as mainstream as the style can get, to the point that it’s trickling down to a couple of generations. There are masses of children who’ve amassed large Instagram followings for ebook evaluations, dances, and nearby activism, and now a number of the youngest hypebeasts on earth have accompanied fit. Initially, Chris describes his Instagram as a clean manner to blow off some innovative steam. Still, Archer appeared lovely enough in his sweats, footwear, and tailor-made jerseys that stardom became inevitable. Today, “The Sneakerhead Dad” hosts 30,000 fans, which means that Chris has been injected into a rebel community of parents who double because of the managers for their streetwear icons.
Mason, a 1-year-antique from the United Kingdom, favors Nike joggers, Supreme jackets, and thin gold chains. His parents have cultivated nearly 60,000 fans in 220 posts. Five-yr-vintage Tyler Huan is a little more aggressive. You can automatically spot him in vertigo-inducing mohawks and angry leather jackets. Ryder’s parents regularly paint his face with airbrushed Post Malone tattoos (complete with the crown of thorns). Sherry Ballan has concerned the entire circle of relatives: Her husband and youngsters game vicious’ fits for a target market of ninety-five,000 fans. Each of them can be kind of lumped into an overarching “hypebeast kids” aesthetic — streetwear for elementary colleges, blessing babies with a closet that the average 22-year-vintage would kill for.
Chris doesn’t describe Sneakerhead Dad as a lucrative undertaking. He’s sincerely now not against the idea. However, that reality appears a long way away. Instead, he’s in it for free clothes. He robotically works with different manufacturers on Instagram who deliver Archer new gear in exchange for sparkling posts on Instagram.
“While we first began out, it was all merchandise that we individually owned and purchased ourselves. So we favored the product,” he explains. “But while brands got here on board, we remained genuine to what our style is and what we constitute. We have had to turn down lots of offers because of an easy question we ask ourselves:.’
Would we purchase this?'”
Here’s how it works. Chris receives an Instagram message from a clothing brand asking if they’re interested in a collaboration. After taking a cautious survey of their style, Chris tells them what he offers: one post in step with the product and “4 to 5” pix for the organization to apply on their personal social media channels. “If they use any images of ours, [they] tag us,” he says. One recurring trouble is how fast Archer grows out of his cloth wardrobe. “He is only six months antique and is in 3.5c length shoes, so I suppose he has already outgrown six or seven pairs!” adds Chris. There aren’t many toddlers with more than one pair of restrained-version footwear, and it made me mildly involved approximately how a good deal of a monetary burden Archer’s ever-evolving apparel necessities have been putting on the Brooke household. Chris says now not to fear; he’s been into shoes for the long term, and he is aware of the way to sniff out a bargain.
