Geobasket

The Geobasket arrived in 2007 without a specific collection context — it was simply added to Rick Owens’s footwear line — and within a few seasons it had become one of the most significant sneakers in fashion. The design is aggressive and unmistakable: a high-top silhouette with exaggerated proportions, a chunky sole that adds visible height, and a paneled leather upper that references vintage basketball shoes while distorting their proportions beyond recognition. The tongue is oversized. The lacing is elongated. Everything about it is louder and stranger than the sneaker it references, which is precisely the point.

What the Geobasket achieved was the creation of a tribal marker. Owens had always attracted a devoted following — people who wore head-to-toe Rick and recognized each other on the street — but the Geobasket gave that tribe a totem. It was the single piece that signaled membership most immediately: visible from a distance, impossible to mistake for anything else, too aggressively proportioned to be worn casually. Internet forums dedicated to Owens’s work (and to the broader “dark fashion” aesthetic) treated the Geobasket as a gateway piece — the first Rick Owens item many people purchased, and the one that committed them to the aesthetic.

The sneaker also represented a structural innovation within Owens’s practice. Where Helmut Lang had incorporated industrial materials into luxury fashion, Owens was incorporating luxury’s craftsmanship into a streetwear form. The Geobasket is constructed from premium leather with the care of an Italian dress shoe, but its silhouette belongs to the basketball court and the skate park. This collapse of high and low — executed without irony, without the winking self-awareness that characterized so much high-low fashion of the period — was new. The Geobasket didn’t reference street culture from above. It entered it, and street culture, recognizing something genuine, made room.