Vic Mensa collaborated with Michigan-based footwear brand Wolverine to produce a collection of boots that break the mold. For the design, the Chicago-born musician chose to riff on the iconic punk footwear staple: combat boots. The 1000 Mile Combat Collection comes in three different heights and colorways and ranges in price from $190 to $210 (a portion of proceeds benefit Mensa’s foundation SaveMoneySaveLife).
The collection is based on original 1000 Mile silhouettes and features custom chunky Vibram sneaker soles, so each model is lightweight, flexible and appropriate for daily wear in the city. Mensa’s choice of leathers reflects his personal style: The Ink colorway features black Horween Rookery leather that is classic punk; Burnout utilizes C.F. Stead Cracked Spitfire leather that looks beat to hell; Anthracite uses matte-black C.F. Stead Metallic Rambler leather that has unique silver streaks.
The aesthetic of the 1000 Mile Combat Collection compliment’s Mensa’s own clothing line 93Punx, a customized assortment of vintage clothing that shares the name of his current musical project. To learn more about the collection, we caught up with Mensa in New York. Touching on everything from vintage inspiration to the punk ethos, he describes why these boots are anything but ordinary.
Q: How did the collaboration start?
A: I pretty much only wear boots, so I’ve had ideas for boot designs for a long time now. When the conversation began with Wolverine, I looked into their history of making boots for the military and, you know, I was looking at old 1960s and ’70s ads they had in Life Magazine. Seemed like a dope opportunity to express some ideas that I’ve been thinking about for some time, and so I incorporated those into the sneakers that they’re focused on at this time.
Q: What’s the style inspired by?
A: I just wanted to incorporate a combat boot type of sole — there’s a Saint Laurent boot that I was kind of basing certain things around and a couple unnamed vintage boots — and just try to represent that and work that into the sneaker.
Q: How do these boots benefit your foundation?
A: So, a portion of the proceeds from this collaboration goes to my foundation which is called SaveMoneySaveLife. We work primarily in the city of Chicago. One of our main programs is called StreetMedics, and so we train people in Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods how to treat gunshot wounds, primarily. How to make a tourniquet, how to apply to a wound, how to seal a two-sided wound. We’ve trained hundreds of kids to date and are seeing success and seeing multiple people that we’ve trained save somebody’s life, usually a family member.
