Nike Dunk Low SB What The Paul

Wear one: keep everything else completely plain, black or grey wide-leg trousers and a single-colour tee, because a shoe with six competing panels cannot share a fit with a pattern. Wear two: heavy blue denim with a white tee and a solid cap, the standard skate uniform, which is the context the shoe was designed inside and where the mismatch reads as humour rather than chaos. Cuff wide legs once so the panels are visible. The padded SB tongue takes a moment to settle, so expect a snug first wear. Clean each panel according to its own material, spot cleaning suede sections dry with a brush and leather sections with a barely damp cloth, and never soak a multi-material upper.

Nike SB's cultural position was built in public and occasionally at cost, most visibly when the company apologised on 27 June 2005 over the Minor Threat artwork and settled out of court. That episode is why SB releases have always been read closely by the people they are aimed at. A What The pair belongs to the loudest end of that catalogue, a shoe that only makes sense to someone who recognises the individual panels, which makes it a legibility test as much as a product. It sits in the same wider story as Nike becoming a status symbol in urban and hip hop fashion from the 1980s, where knowing what a shoe references has always been part of owning it.

Style code CZ2239 600 marks this as an SB build, which means the Dunk Low is reworked for skating rather than for display. The What The format uses the model's panelled construction against itself, since a Dunk is already divided into toe, quarter, Swoosh, eyestay, collar and heel, and each of those can be sourced from a different colourway. The result is a shoe where no two panels necessarily share a material or a shade, and where the two feet are deliberately asymmetric. SB Dunks carry a fatter, more padded tongue and collar than the standard model, which is the concession to landing impact. Underfoot the rubber traces to Bowerman's waffle experiments and the grip logic Nike has chased since.