The Room Was A Clothes Market

Got Sole is a sneaker show. It is named for shoes, the queue outside is there for shoes, and the resale tables in the middle of the hall never stopped moving all afternoon. None of that is in question.

What is worth saying is how much of the floor was clothes.

One stall had been hung like a market stall: football jerseys, a Mexico shirt, a number 82, a Rams varsity jacket, a red Ferrari racing jacket held out by a customer, the whole wall filled from the tabletop to above head height. A man in a grey pinstripe shirt reached up into it while another worked the lower rail. Nothing about that stand was about sneakers.

A few aisles along, a rail of vintage jackets ran beside a hand-lettered sign that read *hand made vintage clothing and accessories*. A Dodgers jacket hung in the middle of it. Somebody walked the rail in wide black shorts with EFFORTLESS down the leg, which is its own kind of answer to the question of what people were shopping for.

On another rack, a row of coloured flares. The pair at the front was bright blue with LOS ANGELES STREET DEPARTMENT printed down the thigh — a label naming the city, on a hanger, at a sneaker convention.

And people shopped it the way you shop a market rather than the way you queue for a drop. Reaching into racks. Pulling things out by the shoulder. Holding a shirt up at arm's length to see the print properly.

The counterweight is real and it was constant. Boxes stacked behind the resale tables; a package going across one of them while we watched. Two kids walking the aisle with an orange shoebox carried between them. A records booth doing its own trade in a corner. The floor sold shoes, and clothes, and a few things that were neither.

So the honest version is not that Got Sole was secretly something else. It is that a show built around sneakers also worked, for a good part of its floor, as a clothing market — and that the clothing half was where a lot of the actual looking happened.

One Saturday, one building, and what we photographed in it. Worth watching whether the balance holds next time.