2007 Supra Skytop

by Lucas Wisenthal

In 2007, the skate shoe industry was in the midst of a dramatic shift, even if the major brands of the day didn’t recognize it. The designs of the late ’90s and early 2000s—puffy and wide, crafted around largely ornamental technologies—were giving way to minimalist silhouettes offering more subtle and significant advances. After a series of false starts, athletic brands had gained traction in the market and were slowly suffocating endemic competitors like éS, DC, and Lakai. And while skate shoe manufacturers had long seen crossover success, Nike had turned its sneakers into collectibles sought out by a niche that seemed to grow each year.

Chad Muska, a longtime pro skater whose first signature sneakers embodied the era of bloated silhouettes, saw skate shoes changing. Muska was the architect of an éS model best remembered for its hidden stash spot and the Circa brand as a whole, and his style—cargo pants, sleeveless undershirts, visor beanies—influenced a generation of skaters.

But by the middle of the 2000s, Muska’s first act was seemingly up. As his skate coverage waned, his appearances in tabloids rose, owing to friendships with Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and their circle of socialites. His fashion influences seemed to grow in tandem; Muska had abandoned his signature look for runway attire. But despite his distance from the skate industry, when Supra Footwear launched in 2005, he was among the first riders it introduced. “Right before Supra started, I had about a year or so where I wasn’t working in footwear,” Muska said.

He also wasn’t skating as much. “I was in Paris for fashion week during that time,” Muska said. “I was going to London Fashion Week and seeing Balenciaga shows, and Dior, and all these different high-end things.”

So when he returned to skate shoe and clothing design, it was with a broader perspective.

“I was really becoming influenced by what was happening in high fashion, and I was super hyped on the idea of bridging those worlds and bringing some of those elements into skateboarding. I felt that at that time, especially, it became kind of stagnant, where it was just a lot of T-shirts, and just really plain, kind of normal stuff.”

With that in mind, Muska created the Skytop, a Supra model that ran counter to almost everything happening in skateboarding in 2007. The exaggerated high-top dwarfed—in the most literal sense of the word—the lows and mids that dominated skate shop walls. So did its price point, which started at $120. And the premium materials on certain colorways were equally at odds with the product the industry at large was pushing—so much so that some Supra reps refused to show it during its initial seasons. But as its momentum built, the Skytop transcended skating, with celebrities including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Justin Bieber wearing the shoe and turning it into, in retrospect, the last blockbuster sneaker released by a traditional skate label.

Supra, however, didn’t see itself as a conventional skate shoemaker. At the time, brands were usually one-dimensional, churning out sneakers and supporting content that channeled hip-hop or punk rock exclusively. Alongside the hip-hop-influenced Muska, Supra’s original team included Jim Greco and Erik Ellington, pros who had ushered in a sort of punk renaissance in skating a few years earlier. And, from its beginnings, Supra had looked beyond skating, both for design cues and an overall market.

“Nothing was good to me at that moment in skateboarding,” said Angel Cabada, Supra’s founder. “I mean, I hated skate shoes at the time. That’s the reason why I made shoes.”

Prior to launching the footwear company, Cabada had built KR3W into one of the biggest skate clothing brands of the 2000s, as with Supra, fusing punk- and hip-hop-inspired imagery and ethos. And before that, he took TSA—Team Santa Ana—from a minor Orange County name to a clothing label that counted Muska among its flagship riders.

Supra’s creative leeway helped draw designer Josh Brubaker from Sole Technology, the company behind Etnies, Emerica, and éS. “They weren’t ready to go to the fashion world and try to do this, maybe because they knew they couldn’t. I don’t know,” said Brubaker. “But that’s just really what I was into at the time.”

Muska was moving in a similar direction. So when the two met to discuss his inaugural Supra shoe, Muska showed up with a bag of sneakers that included models from Dior Homme (now Dior Men) and Marc Jacobs, along with throwback basketball silhouettes.

“I started to see this vision in high fashion where I definitely was super inspired by Hedi Slimane,” Muska said. “He was designing for Dior at the time, and he was really doing some high-top shoes like that. They were elongated toes with a slimmer fit and a really high structure.”

That notion was key to the sneaker Muska wanted to produce. In the ten years that preceded the Skytop’s release, skate fashion had gone from baggy cargos and carpenter jeans to a more narrow silhouette that ranged from bootcut to skintight denim. Sneakers, however, hadn’t evolved in lockstep, so it was not at all uncommon for skaters to pair tight jeans with wide shoes, a combo immortalized in the best-loved videos of the early 2000s.

“I had designed skinny jeans for KR3W Apparel at the time,” said Muska, “and I just saw this skinny leg. And so, all of a sudden, I saw this cool skinny, long-leg jean sitting inside, tucked in this ultra-high-top shoe. And I just thought that seemed like such a cool look and a way to adapt that high-top shoe into that style.”

In Muska’s eyes, the design amounted to a subcultural Venn diagram illustrating the overlap between ’80s rappers and metal musicians, many of whom favored higher silhouettes.

“I was really infatuated by the idea, or really interested in the idea, that these two completely different cultures could adapt and wear a similar type of sneaker,” Muska said. “I thought that there was really something powerful to that, because if the gap that bridges those two cultures is so huge, but they could wear something similar, then that idea could apply well to a mainstream product, too.”

Though Cabada and Brubaker were immediately on board with the concept, it polarized others at Supra.

“Every single person in the company looked at me, and they go, ‘You’re fucking crazy,’” Muska said. “And our shoe developer, he was like, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking, but I’ll make it if that’s what you want to make.’”

Brubaker, said Muska, “just happened to be on the same tip around that time, and he instantly saw what my vision was, what my initial sketches were, and perfected it.”

The team went through roughly three samples before they arrived at the silhouette they’d imagined.

“There was a lot of tweaking of the toe length,” Brubaker said. “We were being, I guess, cautious of how far out we could take it, so trying to key in on key opponents of it being somewhat digestible.” The tongue was also cut by “five or six millimeters from the original sample.” At the same time, the sole was a departure from Muska’s catalog. Prior to the Skytop, his signature shoes had been emblems of their era, with thick cupsoles and visible airbags complementing their bulky uppers. In 2007, though, skate shoes had begun to shed their layers, and classic silhouettes like Vans’s Half Cab and Era—models built atop vulcanized soles—were on the cusp of a resurgence. So, unlike any shoe tied to Muska, the Skytop bore a vulc sole.

“The times had changed, and I wanted to go against everything possible that was traditional skate at that time,” Muska said. “And everything was chunky, cupsole, airbags, all of this different stuff. And I wanted to create something that was more of, like, a sleek, slim, and a flexible product, I think.”

Cabada recognized that such flexibility could come at the expense of the shoe’s comfort. “Something Angel did want—he’s like, ‘They’ve got to be comfortable,’” said Ashley Nichols, former global marketing director of One Distribution, Supra’s parent company. To that end, Supra spent in the neighborhood of one dollar per insole for the shoes.

“I loved it instantly,” Muska said. The sneakers suited all aspects of his life. “You could slip them on and off, but when I would skate, I would tighten them up,” he said. “It was, for me, the best ankle support and protection as well.” With its higher profile, the Skytop guarded the metal plate in his right ankle. “It just protected the whole area, and it was vulcanized, so it was very flexible.”

But Supra didn’t position the Skytop solely as a high-end skate model, something its colorways made abundantly clear. While the first makeup of the sneaker was white, it subsequently arrived in black crocodile suede, as well as gold and silver. Skaters are notoriously guarded, and the silhouette, combined with the color palette, was met with skepticism.

“I think the initial reaction for any skateboarder to see something that comes from within our industry be applied outside of it anywhere is usually an instant negative backlash,” Muska said.

Even internally, at Supra, the Skytop left many wary. “People were afraid of it,” Brubaker said. Literally, people laughed in our face. ‘What is this, a moon boot? What the hell is that?’” The company’s sales reps didn’t know how to sell the model. “After it went into production, it actually became part of the line, it was still, that first season—I heard multiple sales reps say they weren’t even taking it out of the bag. They weren’t going to bother to show it to people.”

But it almost didn’t matter. Muska was still a fixture of Hollywood nightlife, and he was photographed in the sneaker. As the image circulated around the internet, interest in the sneaker increased. “Well, the first couple of seasons were slower, and then, I think in, like, 2008, it really started going,” Brubaker said.

That bump owed, at least in part, to Jay-Z. In 2007, the Roc-A-Fella Records cofounder wore the gold Skytop in Rihanna’s “Umbrella” video. While Jay wasn’t the first to be documented wearing the shoe—Will Smith wore brown Skytops on TRL during the I Am Legend press run—“Umbrella” peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and he was one of the most recognizable entertainers alive. Nichols—an alumnus of Roc-A-Fella—was responsible for the placement. He was also instrumental in putting the Skytop on Lil Wayne, who wore the sneakers throughout his Tha Carter III campaign. “From his videos to his award appearances, he was wearing nothing but Supras,” Nichols said. That included the video for “A Milli.” “He’s in the red patent leathers,” Nichols said. “He was the first to wear those.”

Sales spiked, and two hundred units of the gold and silver makeups “would turn into fucking millions,” Cabada said.

“It took about three years for it to really take a nice rollout, and then eventually every color was thirty, forty, sometimes a hundred thousand. We’re doing ten, twenty colorways, and you’re talking to us about, that’s a lot of shoes.”

By the early 2010s, following the last iteration of the Skytop, skate shoes had once again begun to change, and the appetite for exaggerated high-tops had faded. But for Muska, Cabada, Brubaker, and Nichols—and, really, for Supra as a whole—the impact of the model can’t be overstated.

At the time of this writing, Supra’s future appeared uncertain, with rumors of its collapse circulating. But no matter the brand’s circumstances, Muska credits the Skytop with rejuvenating his career. “I think it came back as complete positive feedback and encouragement to not only continue as a designer, but to continue as a skater, too, and keep putting out more video parts and skate content as well. So it kind of breathed life into me in many different ways.”

“We left something in the history of skateboarding, and footwear as well,” Brubaker said. “A lot of people knew, I think, what the Skytop name was before they even knew what Supra was.”

Honorable Mention
Nike Zoom Soldier

by Mike DeStefano

LeBron James was the first overall pick in the 2003 NBA Draft at only eighteen years old. By 2007, he was already on his fourth signature shoe. The Cleveland Cavaliers had completed back-to-back fifty-win seasons, and James had led the team to their second playoff berth of his career. Before the start of the 2005–06 season, Nike decided to double down on the annual offerings from his signature line, adding to it the 20-5-5, named for his season averages from his rookie year, for outdoor use. While that would be the first pair he laced up in the postseason, the performance-driven Zoom Soldier he debuted the following year would become more memorable, thanks to its link to one of James’s most iconic performances.

The silhouette featured a leather and nubuck upper, a large Velcro strap across the midfoot, and an ankle wrap system that provided additional lockdown on the court. It was a far cry from the boot-like Foamposite upper of the Nike LeBron 4 he wore throughout the regular season.

The Soldier elicited some questions. Would anyone remember a takedown model from James’s line? And was it even a “real” LeBron sneaker? It had his name and logo on it. But, at $110, it cost $40 less than the 4. It also didn’t have the full-length Zoom Air unit, with its cushioning system limited to the heel. The sneakers were geared up for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 2006–07 playoff run, which saw a young James take his team to his first NBA Finals.

James wore multiple Soldier colorways through that playoff campaign, none more memorable than the navy blue, white, and gold pair that he laced up for Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Detroit Pistons. He scored 29 of the Cavs’ final 30 points—including the last 25 straight and a game-winning layup—on his way to an overtime victory in one of the best individual playoff performances in NBA history. That singular superhuman performance was enough to make the sneaker important. The display against the Pistons made the Soldier more than a model—Nike went on to produce yearly Soldier editions in its wake.

It was such a memorable moment that Nike even brought that Zoom Soldier colorway back in 2018 as part of its “Art of a Champion” collection, which remains the only time that the model has received a retro release. Whether it’s a “real” LeBron shoe or not, James has done remarkable things in this sneaker.