The Story of MSCHF, a Very Modern … Business? (original) (raw)
Style|The Story of MSCHF, a Very Modern … Business?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/style/MSCHF-sneakers-culture.html
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Gabriel Whaley, the chief executive of MSCHF, outside the company’s Brooklyn office.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times
Gabriel Whaley and his colleagues do whatever they want all day. Sometimes, they even make money.
Gabriel Whaley, the chief executive of MSCHF, outside the company’s Brooklyn office.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times
- Published Jan. 30, 2020Updated March 30, 2021
In recent years, stars have lent their names to all kinds of sneaker collaborations. Puma had Rihanna. Reebok had Gigi Hadid. Adidas had Kanye West. Nike had … Jesus Christ?
Not exactly. In October, a pair of “Jesus shoes” — customized Air Max 97s whose soles contained holy water from the River Jordan — appeared online for $1,425. They were designed by a start-up called MSCHF, without Nike’s blessing.
The sneakers quickly sold out and began appearing on resale sites, going for as much as $4,000. The Christian Post wrote about them. Drake wore them. They were among the most Googled shoes of 2019.
The only thing that didn’t happen, said Kevin Wiesner, 27, a creative director at MSCHF, was a public disavowal of the shoes by Nike or the Vatican. “That would’ve been rad,” he said.
Now, in the MSCHF office in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a pair stands like a trophy.
MSCHF isn’t a sneaker company. It rarely even produces commercial goods, and its employees are reluctant to call it a company at all. They refer to MSCHF, which was founded in 2016, as a “brand,” “group” or “collective,” and their creations, which appear online every two weeks, as “drops.”
Many of those drops are viral pranks: an app that recommends stocks to buy based on one’s astrological sign (which some observers took seriously), a service that sends pictures of A.I.-generated feet over text, a browser extension that helps users get away with watching Netflix at work.
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