There are a few fashion pieces that capture an entire scene and community holistically.
One of those just happens to be the Nike TN. That shoe alone is synonymous with Sydney street culture and eventually recognised as adlay fashion.
TNs were very different to every other offering on the market back in the day. Loud in colour, heavy in contrast and just felt rebellious. From its release in 1998, it carried the highest price tag in Foot Locker stores, making it the most obvious target for searchers. And aside from being the most expensive shoe in the store, it just looked good. It was marketed as a running shoe too – now, we all know nobody's doing Usain numbers in TNs, but hey, it is what it is. But that price tag came with status.
Random fact: TNs were the most racked shoes from Foot Locker Australia. There were really only a few reasons people were wearing TNs across Sydney: you were rich enough to afford a pair, ballsy enough to roll someone else's or rack them straight from the store. Either way, they fed into the cult following and the unspoken requirements that came with having permission to rock TNs.
Random Foot Locker lore: it's alleged (and I want to be clear, this is unconfirmed, hence alleged) that they directly approached Bikies to wear the shoe.
TNs are commonly worn by a few segments that closely tie into one another: housing residents, searchers, graffers, b*mb3rs, youth gangs, bogans, ravers, hoodrats, urbexers, junkies, tagged offenders, dealers, Aussie rappers, inmates and juvies. Some of the people in these segments felt obligated to exclusively wear TNs only. Again, it was just an entire status and pride thing, which was validated.
Honestly, a lot of the people crossed into more than one of those labels, but it would be super dishonest to level any of them out as each one played a part in shaping the culture into what it is today.
Graff and Hardstyle (2010s and Prior)
Before the 'Adlay' term, TNs was synonymous with the graffiti scene. From @creasedheat: if you were lacing up a pair and catching the Western line, the youth would clock your shoes before anything else. First question out of their mouth was where you'd been tagging, what you'd hit, so they could keep an eye out for your work from the window on the ride home. That train line was basically a moving gallery. TNs were just the unofficial uniform for the youth to identify the taggers. @creasedheat says, "I wanted to be a ninja, not wear a uniform."
And for the graffers, lurking at train stations or planning your execution at a train yard as if it were a bank heist was just routine. If you got caught, you were facing layers of charges: trespassing, destruction of property, vandalism at minimum. Though something funny is that TNs were probably one of the worst shoes to graff in. Those large soles and thick heels would've made moving across train yards genuinely difficult. Not every graffer was thinking about that, but still.
The hardstyle scene was also littered with TNs. At any hardstyle event or under-18s night, people were hakking and gabbering in TNs. While the TN never became fully synonymous with the hardstyle scene, it became an indirect uniform which is still in place today.
The Adlay Era and the Junkie Stigma (2010s to 2018)
Before 'Eshay' became a term, 'Adlays' was the predecessor. This was when TNs gained a bit of a louder presence in the face of media. So, this would have been pre-2018. To some, 'adlays' carried a negative connotation. One thing that I feel gets overlooked when talking about the relevance of TNs in Australia – let's be honest, it's really a Sydney conversation – is the growing sentiment in certain segments that the TN had become a junkie shoe. That stigma ultimately reflected a rejection of TNs as a fashion statement for some.
Now I don't know if there's any real connection here, because it's just simply what I saw. Take early Kerser’s early days. You could find him rocking TNs. Yes, I have receipts. But in his rise, Kerser completely dumped TNs. You genuinely can not find him in a pair at all. This is just my allegation. You heard it here first.
The Facebook Groups: Where the TN Stayed Alive (2013 to 2021)
During the early 2000s to maybe mid 2010s, TN was getting battered by the media – feeds to my point above, where TN was developing a ‘junkie’ segment image. You would find all your grails on sale back then too. But through all of that, there was a community keeping the flame alive and a lot of that happened in designated Facebook groups.
Before the current Tn Talk Aus group that most of you are familiar with, there were three predecessors that all got completely Zucc’d. It's been a minute since I thought about this, but they went by NIKE TN AU/NZ and then TN TALK AUS – @traqsuit, please confirm the names on those.
I'll keep it real: for any new head or m3thhead joining those groups, it was absolutely brutal in there. The roasts could honestly be classified as psychological w*rfare. Scammers were getting openly doxxed, people were getting banned for unsubstantiated reasons or just for disagreeing with reputable figures. Sidenote: I always try to stay as unbiased as I can; hence, the aforementioned. There's a lot of contentiousness and political correctness that could be said about all of that, but the reason I'm mentioning it is that despite all the chaos, those groups genuinely helped keep the TN scene alive at its lowest point of popularity. They continued the trading, buying and selling of TNs, importing and exporting internationally. The group, while technically a buy/sell/trade page, contributed heavily to fostering what became a real cult TN community.
On April 2021, the OG group received its final Zucc and everyone pivoted to the current Tn Talk Aus, which was ironically created by people who had been banned from the original. Worth noting that the current group was also the first time Foot Locker properly tapped into the culture - major props to Tim Ingram. Again, I said I'm unbiased lads, I just document what I see.
What was accepted in the previous OG group was revered in the new. And I want to acknowledge that in both the OG and current groups, there's been good and bad evenly. I'm saying that so neither new heads nor old heads come for my throat. I genuinely didn't intend to write this much about it, but here we are. And man, if I start talking about the TN Worldwide Facebook group… Anyways.
But tying it all back into the point of this brain dump. These TN pages dictated the prices of the resale market. It also indirectly controlled what colourway was popular, what pairs was seen as a grail and who you could trust to buy TNs from.
The Resurgence, Eshays, and the New TN Heads (2019 Onwards)
In 2019, TNs had a massive resurgence, but this time into the forefront of mass Australian culture. The rise of drill is honestly to blame. A wave of resellers arrived, prices skyrocketed, and with them came a wave of new heads. COVID lockdown didn’t help, coupled with the Government JobSeeker scheme. Don’t lie, most of the new heads and resellers used that money to start reselling TNs, LOL.
This period was also the first time we were actually seeing TNs sell out within a day. I remember people were lining up early for the women's Pink Fade releases. Even the smallest sizes were being sold out. Other notable mentions are the Killer Whales and the TN3 Lazer Blues. I was working at Foot Locker Mounty and Parra during this period and it was honestly the most hype I’ve ever seen with TNs. Cheeky sidenote: how many of you actually know the origins of how JAWN’s Curated started, HAHA?
The Forever TN Disconnect
If you haven't clocked it by now, I've been indirectly pointing at a significant disconnect within the TN segments: new heads vs old heads, the junkie perception vs the searcher and graffer identity. Just a huge discontent all around. And out of this resurgence came a new term, pushed hard by the media. Everyone wearing TNs were getting labelled as 'Eshays', which is a complete evolution from 'Adlays'. In its most distinctive description, eshays are the lads who dressed like the UK roadmen and joined at the peak of TN popularity. And just like 'adlays' once was by some segments, particularly searchers and graffers, the term 'eshay' was largely perceived as an insult by the broader public. But just like some, lads were proud to call themselves adlays, we saw the same thing play out with eshays. History repeating itself, honestly, lol.
The Current State of TNs
The current TN scene is a bit funny. OG heads across most segments have largely shifted out; thus, many of the original attitudes and behaviours from the OG segments have been lost. However, there is this sense of pride that still comes with living or being associated with that era, as well as a claim of ownership, which is all valid. The majority of the scene's presence now is new heads. But what I've noticed is that a lot of those OG segments have carried their upbringing into a hustle-hard mentality and built genuinely successful careers. Whether that's in entrepreneurship, influencing, fitness, lifestyle, whatever.
As for the shoe itself, TN quality and feel have drastically decreased, and it's been on that path since 2018 – when Nike was switching manufacturers between China and Vietnam, and then the year after, between Vietnam and Indonesia. A lot of new heads haven't had the opportunity to experience a China-made pair, which was the real golden age. There's a misconception that Viet-made pairs are the gold standard, but some of my early 2010 Viets were honestly some of the worst pairs I've ever had, no lie.
And what do I think about where it all sits now? Corporate brands jumped on community engagement too late. TNs were already on a downward trajectory with the OG segments that I mentioned at the start of this blog – from the moment resellers flooded the market. And post-COVID, TN took another hit with many collectors having offset their collection to capitalise on the resale prices. And with the digital and social landscape moving so fast, those same brands were too slow to maximise their leverage on the scene. Now, what I mean by that is you’ll just have to look at the creativity of colourways and the quantity of colourway releases now compared to six years ago -double to almost triple the output, but at a very few colour blocks. From a wider corporate brand relevance perspective, market equity and cultural leadership have long been challenged. OG Sydney fashion was dying – Nautica dead, Henley dead, and many more. Fashion trends also never stay, it’s always moving and that's just the nature of it.
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