After the Hype

What happens to a generation that learned to flip shoes instead of wear them.

For roughly a decade, a sneaker was not a shoe. It was a lottery ticket with laces. The raffles, the bots, the resale apps with candlestick charts, the unboxing videos in which the box mattered more than the shoe: an entire generation received its financial education through footwear, learning words like liquidity and exit before learning what a well-made sole feels like at kilometer ten.

Then the market did what markets do. Resale premiums thinned, the bots turned on emptier rooms, and the checkout queue stopped being a personality. The comedown has been quietly healthy. Prices found the floor, and on the way down something old fell out of the box: the shoe itself.

Watch what the sneaker people are doing now. The grails are coming off the shelves and onto feet. Creases, once treated like structural damage to an asset, are being worn openly, almost proudly, the way denim people wear fades. The conversation has drifted from resale value to comfort, materials, and the previously unspeakable question of whether a shoe is actually good. The collector is becoming a wearer, which is a demotion for the portfolio and a promotion for the person.

Perfume lived this same arc, and the house watched it from inside. Fragrance had its own hype years: split-second drops, decant flippers, bottles bought sealed as investments and never once sprayed. Our position then is our position now, written plainly in The Strange Pace: do not blind-buy, do not chase every release, appreciate what you already have. A bottle unopened and a sneaker unworn suffer the same fate. They are luxury used as storage, and the Couturier already told you what that is worth.

None of this means the culture was worthless. The hype years taught an entire region to care about provenance, materials and release histories, to know its archives, to queue for craft. That literacy survives the bubble. Aimed at ownership instead of arbitrage, it is exactly the education a good wardrobe runs on: buy less, know more, wear everything. The best thing in your rotation should have scuffs. That is not depreciation. That is the receipt of a life.