Coney Island Classic "White/Navy"

Before Starbury and before his turn in Chinese basketball, Stephon Marbury was AND1’s marquee signature athlete, and the Coney Island Classic ties the shoe directly to where he came from. Marbury grew up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, a stretch of New York that produced playground legends and heartbreak in roughly equal measure, and AND1 built his signature around that identity rather than around a logo or a gimmick.

The brand re-released the Coney Island Classic in 2017, returning a late-1990s and early-2000s basketball shoe to a market that had mostly forgotten how big AND1 once was. This white and navy colorway carries the AND1 player logo on the panel and rides on a translucent sole, a chunky, of-its-era basketball build that reads as pure turn-of-the-millennium hardwood. AND1 occupies a strange place in sneaker memory. For a few years it was everywhere, on mixtapes, on playgrounds and on NBA feet, then it faded almost completely. Shoes like the Coney Island Classic are the evidence that it mattered, that there was a real alternative to the giants for players who wanted something with street credibility built in. For an archive documenting the full field rather than only the survivors, Marbury’s Coney Island is an important entry.