One morning in Manhattan: downtown, a sneaker pop-up selling ninety-nine-cent AriZona Iced Tea-branded Adidas turned into a riot, with a bottle hurled and police summoned. Seventy blocks uptown: Sotheby’s hosted a hushed display of a hundred pairs of what the auction house called the “rarest sneakers ever produced.” Among the people in the gallery was Miles S. Nadal, the Canadian-born executive chairman of the Peerage Capital Group. He was dressed like any other sixty-one-year-old businessman, in a dark suit and a striped tie, but on his feet he wore a spotless pair of “varsity blue/varsity red” Sacai x Nike LDWaffle trainers, which featured double Swooshes, two tongues, and midsoles that jutted out the back like little cliffs. He had bought them the day before, for seven hundred and fifty dollars, at the SoHo sneaker store Stadium Goods.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” Nadal said, of his shoe habit. He paused for effect: “Since Saturday.” That’s when he agreed to buy ninety-nine pairs of the sneakers in the Sotheby’s sale; they had originally been scheduled to be auctioned online, in partnership with Stadium Goods. He paid eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the lot. He wanted to buy all hundred pairs, but one, the only known pair of Nike Moon Shoes in never-worn condition, designed in 1972 by the company’s co-founder, Bill Bowerman, was off limits. (The consignor decided to keep them available for public auction.) Nadal hadn’t paid attention to sneakers before. “I saw a piece in the Post about the sale,” he said. But he’d been collecting cars seriously since meeting Jay Leno, seven years ago. (He had purchased a hangout with Leno at a charity auction.) Now he has a hundred and forty-two rare cars and forty motorcycles, which are kept in a private collection, in Toronto, that he calls the Dare to Dream Automobile Museum. “I’m going to put the sneakers in as a permanent installation,” he said.
Nadal seems ready for some new hobbies. In 2015, he was the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into his expenses, as C.E.O. of a company called M.D.C. Partners. The S.E.C. later fined him five and a half million dollars and banned him for five years from serving as an officer or director of a public company. (Peerage is privately owned.) He had failed to disclose perks, including cosmetic surgery, jewelry, pet care, and yacht-related expenses, totalling more than eleven million dollars.
“I learned that you can never be too humble,” he said. He was joined in the exhibition space by Noah Wunsch, Sotheby’s global head of e-commerce. The two had met earlier this year, after Peerage bought Sotheby’s International Realty Canada. Wunsch pointed to a pair of blue sneakers in a vitrine—the Air Jordan 11 Derek Jeter shoe, commemorating the New York Yankee’s retirement, in 2017. Only five pairs were given out, via a scratch-off lottery.
“My favorite shoe might be the Jeter shoe,” Nadal said. “A, I love Jeter. And, B, I just love the aesthetic of it.”
“The navy suède is gorgeous,” Wunsch said. “It’s got an Yves Klein blue to it.”
“I was thinking if I could find something like this that wasn’t as dear, that was wearable, I’d buy three or four pair of them,” to keep in his homes in New York, Toronto, the Bahamas, and Florida, Nadal said. Next, they admired four pairs of unreleased Travis Scott x Air Jordan 4s, designed by Scott, a rapper, for friends and family. “My kids know all about him because he’s Kylie Jenner’s boyfriend,” Nadal said. They moved on to another musician-designed shoe, a 2017 collaboration between Pharrell, Adidas, and Chanel—this one with the word “Karl” on the upper. Pharrell had given them to Karl Lagerfeld, who died in February.
In the center of the room was a vitrine containing the Nike Moon Shoes, which were displayed with a vintage waffle iron. (Bowerman used his wife’s waffle iron to create the prototype of the shoe’s sole.) “These are unbelievable,” Nadal said, peering through the glass. “First of all, love Nike. Love Phil Knight,” the other Nike founder. Nadal mentioned Knight’s best-selling memoir, “Shoe Dog.” “Actually read the book—cover to cover! A rarity for me.” He stared at the Moon Shoes. The presale estimate was a hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
The next week, Nadal nabbed the Moon Shoes, for four hundred and thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. The price beat the world auction record—a hundred and ninety thousand dollars, for a signed pair of Converse worn by Michael Jordan. Afterward, Nadal said that he expected sneaker collecting to become a lifelong passion. “I have a big quote on the wall in my museum, and it says, ‘The unattainable is invariably attractive,’ ” he said. “It’s not my quote—I got it from the Porsche Museum, in Germany—but I think it’s true.” The quote is by the artist Jenny Holzer, who painted it on the side of a BMW “art car,” and is widely understood to be a critique of consumerism. ♦
