“They only made rubber products in the fall, winter and spring, and wanted to keep those people working through the summer months,” Mr Smallidge says. Early areas of expertise included but were not limited to galoshes, leather duck-hunting boots, automobile tires, tennis shoes and then, eventually, basketball shoes, which were initially introduced to keep Converse’s seasonal staff on the assembly line all year-round. Here, in the inaugural edition of The Journal’s series on the history of iconic kicks, we take a closer look at the birth of this century-old basketball shoe.įounded in 1908 by Mr Marquis Mills Converse in Malden, Massachusetts, the Converse Rubber Company spent its formative years doing what most of the industry were doing at the time: “Really anything you could make out of rubber, we tried to make something out of rubber,” says Mr Sam Smallidge, the brand’s in-house archivist. And yet, it was during this annus horribilis that the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star made its debut a basketball shoe that would go on to achieve an illustrious level of ubiquity in the sneaker world. ![]() “Talk about a difficult moment!” Ms Elizabeth Semmelhack, creative director and senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and author of numerous books charting sneaker history and culture, tells MR PORTER. ![]() WWI was still raging, and the devastation of the Spanish flu pandemic was imminent. Ostensibly, 1917 is an unlikely year to start a success story.
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