Tobie Quainton has spent eleven years looking for the same pair of Nike trainers. Eleven years. That's 132 months. Or 4,015 days, which is exactly half the time he's spent literally living and breathing on this earth. You could fly to Mars, hang about growing plants a la Mark Damon for a year, fly back down and repeat another four times and you still wouldn't have reached the amount of time this guy has spent searching for an item invented to protect your feet from stepping in shit.
Still, it's a particularly special item. In Quainton's eyes, anyway. The trainer he hunted down for over a decade was an Air Max 95, a Nike collaboration with Japanese sneaker boutique Atmos. It's not what you'd call subtle: stripes of leopard, tiger, cow and cheetah print cover the entire foot. Released in late 2006, it's rumoured only 5,000 were made.
"I must have been about 11 when I first saw them," Quainton explains, "but the internet wasn't a big thing back then. You couldn't press a few buttons and get something delivered from across the other side of the world. You had to find it yourself. But they literally summed me up in a shoe, and ever since then I've been looking for them."
That search ended two weeks ago. When a different but similarly hyped sneaker dropped last year – the Supreme x Nike Air Max 98 Snakeskin – he bought two pairs and subsequently swapped one of those for his beloved 95s (a persistent seller came calling). After years spent scrolling through page upon page of Yahoo! Japan, he got what he wanted, and didn't even have to pay for the pleasure. Surely he was ecstatic to finally get his hands on them? Sated? A little relieved, maybe?
"I dunno – it's an odd one," he begins. "It's like completing something, I guess. A bit like closure. I didn't jump around my house celebrating or anything, but you do get a real sense of achievement."
Welcome to the ruthlessly dedicated world of grails. If the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word "grail" as "any greatly desired and sought-after objective; ultimate ideal or reward" then this takes worshipping at the altar of rare streetwear and sprints, 100 miles an hour, off into the distance with it. It's the one item you want above everything else: unachievable, unobtainable, almost mythical in it's hard-to-find ness. A one-of-a-kind Supreme x Andrei Molodkin "Donald Trump" T-shirt, for example, last seen selling for over £18,000 on eBay.Welcome to the ruthlessly dedicated world of grails. If the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word "grail" as "any greatly desired and sought-after objective; ultimate ideal or reward" then this takes worshipping at the altar of rare streetwear and sprints, 100 miles an hour, off into the distance with it. It's the one item you want above everything else: unachievable, unobtainable, almost mythical in it's hard-to-find ness. A one-of-a-kind Supreme x Andrei Molodkin "Donald Trump" T-shirt, for example, last seen selling for over £18,000 on eBay.
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