“Are we past the Panda hate?” asks Complex Sneakers Podcast co-host Joe La Puma. He isn’t talking about endangered wild animals or an animated movie character — or even 2016’s smash hit single, “Panda” by Desiigner. He’s talking about Nike’s popular Panda Dunks, or the Dunk Low Retro, as they call it. “It’s a good-looking sneaker,” he adds.
His cohort, Brendan Dunne, the General Manager of Sole Collector, another sneaker outlet, agrees. “It’s such a basic sneaker. That’s the point of the shoe: It’s a black and white Nike Dunk Low — how could you ever be mad at there being a million pairs out there?” he asks.
They went back and forth debating the ubiquity of Nike’s well-known lifestyle sneaker, which first debuted in March 2021 for a fair $100. And even though they’re hard to buy now, and now $110, Nike has re-released them several times, flooding the market with Panda-colored kicks. Just look on TikTok or Twitter, where videos of like-minded shoppers go viral: “NYC is a pandaemic,” one caption reads.
Culturally, they’re “rinsed,” many would argue, or as Urban Dictionary puts its: overplayed, like a good song that gets played too many times on the radio. The Dunk is a good sneaker, and it’s been around since 1985, when they first debuted in a team-specific colorway for the University of Miami. They’ve grown more popular as of late, with editions done by the late Virgil Abloh, Union and others. The Pandas, however, are a general release, not a collab, which makes them more readily available.
And that annoys snotty sneakerheads, who feel these first-time “hype” sneaker buyers are making sneaker collecting, if you will, even more mainstream. They’re the ones who are making Dunk Lows harder to buy for everyone else; they’re the ones that make all-white Air Force 1s hard to find; in comparison to real estate, they’re gentrification foreshadowing.
But they can’t be the only ones buying Dunks. According to GOAT, an online sneaker resale platform (that just bought Grailed), Nike Dunks accounted for only 3.64 percent of all Nike sales on its platforms in 2020. In 2021, that percentage rose to 29.73 percent. In 2022, Dunks have dominated. Its share of Nike sales has spiked to 49.44 percent.
