crooked tongues magazine News Features

Even if American sports stop and start a little too often for your low Euro attention span, you've got to love the NBA All-Star Weekend. The Slam Dunk competition alone is greatness distilled, and specifically for a few hours of big budget entertainment, we get to see some of the maddest colourways of performance and heritage pieces. With Dallas as the location, it's inevitable that familiar elements of the city are being shoehorned into the All-Star rollout. We're not talking about a shitfaced Sue-Ellen here either. For performance makeups we're talking woodgrains from ranch walls, western-style typography on the dubraes/lace jewels (the former if you're a bit fancy, the latter if you're less flamboyant), and just in case that all sounds a little too 'Little House on the Prairie,' we all know the aim of the game from a sponsorship standpoint is to make a splash on court and on camera.


Browns can't cut it there, so there's a healthy dose of borderline-infrared for the Western crew and a hard-to-miss blue for the Eastern crew, all with tree-texture panels complimenting the ultra-progressive looks. The last twelve months have seen some significant breakthroughs for Nike's basketball division, with the Kobe V, LeBron VII, Hyperize and Kevin Durant's KDII - no stranger to crazed colours, dropping. It's been one of the most fruitful periods for hi-top, and in the case of Mr. Bryant, low-top design since the madness of the late '90s, so this is something of a celebration. But Nike also know some of you can't be dealing with the science fiction shoe design for casual wear, and Air Force 1s are an All-Star necessity. You're spoilt for choice for Uptowns this year.

Ghosts in the machine meant we couldn't include either of the highs, but you've probably seen them already. The Tier Zero variation with shades of the recent Futura in the perforated upper, a reflective ankle strap and swoosh, plus a glow-in-the-dark outsole, all in a colourway that reminds us of an old Dunk Lo Pro is crazy, but the four AF1 lows are decent too. Provided you can take patent leather...with silver basketball texture branding. We can, because this weekend is no place for shrinking violets or fading into the background. It's loud, calculated and bombastic, and these shoes are no exception. Dallas-shaped heel embossing bellows the message too., yet these are the most subdued All-Star versions of a shoe we've seen lately. Like we said, All-Star Weekend is a place where the subdued is forsaken. We've got a limited number of the Quickstrike Forces <a href= 'http://www.crookedtongues.com/store/index.php'>instore</a> now...