Chris Kaman was an uncommon NBA participant. The one-time Los Angeles Clipper had a propensity for bizarre flexes—falling asleep throughout a recreation, posing with a useless cat earlier than a Charlotte Bobcats recreation, fabricating a viral information story about Blake Griffin smacking Justin Bieber—however was additionally an All-Star, cracking the lineup in 2010. A real enigma, very similar to the brand new wacky-but-kinda-fire basketball clogs by streetwear startup Scary Kittles, dubbed “the Kaman” in his honor, which simply dropped at this time.
“He got here into the league as this seven-foot, goofy-looking white dude with lengthy, blond hair who weirdly had an ambidextrous recreation that had this actually unorthodox fashion to it,” says Evan Extra, co-founder of the LA-via-NYC model. “It simply felt like the right marriage, kind of like what we wished to attain with these sneakers.”
Stefan Kohli
That includes an orange leather-based higher with embossed black strains emulating the grooves on a basketball, the funky footwear was designed by Scary Kittles co-founder Jack Herzog, whose day job is senior designer at fast-rising Brooklyn label KidSuper. The slip-ons turned some heads when the model teased them on X in February, and so they’re sure to make much more noise on social media now that they’ve formally landed.
Herzog had the sketch for the clogs sitting in his again pocket for a minute. “I have been exhibiting folks the design for actually years,” says the 30-year-old. “Each time I all the time acquired a very strong response, even from non-basketball followers. It simply sort of is sensible. It’s a type of concepts the place I am similar to, ‘I can not consider this does not exist but.’”
It took a variety of R&D to good the Kaman. The fellows tried experimenting with Horween leather-based, the official materials used for NBA basketballs, nevertheless it didn’t fairly meet their aesthetic requirements. They went with real leather-based as an alternative, over a contoured cork footbed. However the Lebowski carpet of the entire thing is the inexperienced suede insole.“It sort of ties the entire design collectively,” says Herzog, including he wished it to resemble “playground-green basketball courts.”