"Some of my earliest pop culture memories are of basketball players or hip-hop musicians and rappers wearing these [shoes]," Kim told Refinery29, noting that in the late '80s and early '90s we saw more athletes wearing their Nikes off the court — not as a way of promoting a design, but simply because they liked them, and that trend eventually seeped into the music industry. "It's always been part of the street scene." And, as we're well aware, the '90s are very zeitgeist-y right now, and many of the fashion pieces we associate with that era came back with it: "the basketball star, the girl groups like TLC and Salt-N-Pepa, Aaliyah — you look at how they were always incorporating sneakers into their style," Kim said. "At its core, Nike is a performance brand — and these sneakers are a performance sneaker — but through culture it’s become a bigger part of fashion; it's found its way back in."