story

Hey, I am Alexis Sablone and I'm a skateboarder and designer and we're here in my studio right now in Brooklyn. I've been skateboarding for 27 years. I think my work kind of spans graphics, animations to like large scale...

...sculptures, often skate-able things. I got a call from SB asking if I wanted to work on these kits that's SB and Converse, like coming together to do this like double pack of shoes and the uniforms. And it just seemed like...

...I don't know, a wild opportunity. For the crests, I think I wanted to try to infill different stories rooted in skateboarding.

The chameleon crest is just more of a story about skateboarding generally that could represent all skateboarders in skateboarding. So it's kind of not tied to any country, but the idea that this is a global thing that all types of people skateboard now that...

...through the chameleon, obviously you can look all kinds of different ways, you adapt to the cities around you. For the U.S. crest, classic American iconography, eagles, roses, but is showing this kind of this boom or explosion of skateboarding...

...that skateboarding was born here and now has like gone on to become this global thing that doesn't in any way belong to us, but the fact that like that's its origin story is pretty cool.

For Japan, I think it's like, there's a different story there as someone from the outside looking in, someone that's like a really big fan of a lot of the skating that's come out of Japan. Some of my favorite videos on the women's side, you know, a lot of the...

...skaters that have just like destroyed me in competitions are Japanese skaters and just on the women's side, well, on all sides now, I guess like the level is pretty mind blowing. And so to me that's a story of kind of this like...

...bubbling under the surface and that's shown through like a cherry blossom that's kind of like spiraling out and exploding into this really remarkable and really like creative and different thing.

The concept of uniforms is really like foreign to skateboarding, I think so much of skating is about individuality and expressing yourself through not just like the tricks you do or the spots you choose, but also what you choose to put on.

So because of that, I wanted to make as diverse a range as I could. And also a range in terms of going from kind of more simple and plain to things that are like louder and more graphic heavy, 'cause that's, some people like that as well.

AS-1, which is my shoe, in a double box with a [SB] Dunk and try to like pair these two different shoes together in a way where they're, they have some kind of relationship but are also really different.

I wanted it to start off kind of more like neutral earth tones and then also a bit classic still with the white in the back panels, but then wear away to something unexpected, the kind of pink purple that it wears away to.

And so the wear away, like in the AS-1 obviously is a project that's really important to me. Like a shoe I designed like from the ground up from afar, it looks pretty classic. And then they both wear away...

... to all pink, so I guess if you were to skate everywhere on the shoe it would just become a pink shoe. My kick flips, its the very top of my shoe starts to turn pink, and a little bit on a different...

...and a little bit on the side. And heel flips up here, so it's just kind of, that's just a fun thing of skateboarding. It's kind of like shows a map of how different people skate and kind of a hint of individuality there.

I like that and I think it also ties back against the idea of a chameleon. the shoe not only transforms from one thing to another but it's going to transform into a unique way depending on how you skate.

Thanks for watching. This is Behind the Design of the SB Dunk Low, AS-1 Pro and Federation Kits. 

Behind the Design: Nike SB x Converse x Alexis Sablone