“Are we past the Panda hate?” asks Complex Sneakers Podcast co-host Joe La Puma. He isn’t talking about endangered wild animals or an animated movie character — or even 2016’s smash hit single, “Panda” by Desiigner. He’s talking about Nike’s popular Panda Dunks, or the Dunk Low Retro, as they call it. “It’s a good-looking sneaker,” he adds.
His cohort, Brendan Dunne, the General Manager of Sole Collector, another sneaker outlet, agrees. “It’s such a basic sneaker. That’s the point of the shoe: It’s a black and white Nike Dunk Low — how could you ever be mad at there being a million pairs out there?” he asks.
Welcome to Heat Check: A guide to the trends and products taking the internet by a storm. Discover more here.
They went back and forth debating the ubiquity of Nike’s well-known lifestyle sneaker, which first debuted in March 2021 for a fair $100. And even though they’re hard to buy now, and now $110, Nike has re-released them several times, flooding the market with Panda-colored kicks. Just look on TikTok or Twitter, where videos of like-minded shoppers go viral: “NYC is a pandaemic,” one caption reads.
Culturally, they’re “rinsed,” many would argue, or as Urban Dictionary puts its: overplayed, like a good song that gets played too many times on the radio. The Dunk is a good sneaker, and it’s been around since 1985, when they first debuted in a team-specific colorway for the University of Miami. They’ve grown more popular as of late, with editions done by the late Virgil Abloh, Union and others. The Pandas, however, are a general release, not a collab, which makes them more readily available.
And that annoys snotty sneakerheads, who feel these first-time “hype” sneaker buyers are making sneaker collecting, if you will, even more mainstream. They’re the ones who are making Dunk Lows harder to buy for everyone else; they’re the ones that make all-white Air Force 1s hard to find; in comparison to real estate, they’re gentrification foreshadowing.
