Sneaker Street in Mong Kok, Hong Kong

Sneaker Street aka Fa Yuen Street, Mong Kok, Hong Kong
by Gio Chiappetta

Mong Kok literally means “busy corner” in Chinese. I just looked it up on wikipedia.com and it says that Mong Kok is in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest population density in the world, the Chinese don’t play.

Mong Kok is comprised of a few well known streets, markets and shopping arcades. It’s home to organized crime and it’s one of the central hubs of Hong Kong’s mainland side, or as the ignorant wealthy people here like to call it, ‘the dark side’. Ladies Market is pretty popular, it’s got a bunch of fake shit that tourists get charged way too much for. Goldfish Street is full of fish and illegal animals that have been smuggled in from China and sold at a small price… I bought a kitten there once. Portland Street which is where all the Chinese hookers are at… different vibe than the Chiz, no Filipinos. And then there’s Sneaker Street… on good seasons it can be a sneaker heads wet dream.

For the most part I’d like to say that 90% of the sneakers on Sneaker Street are real. Contrary to popular belief, there’s more fake food in Hong Kong than there are fake handbags and sneakers. I would say that there is more bootleg shit floating around New York City than there is Hong Kong… 99.9% of those Bape’s and AF1’s you guys have in the North America and Canada are fakes, I know the people who sell them to you. You know what they say, “If it ain’t from the store, it’s from offshore.”

Sneaker Street, which is actually only about two blocks long, is a combination of sporting goods stores, licensed retail outlets and smaller mom and pop type stores. The sporting goods stores sell a mix of A and B grade, authentic and bootleg, a lot of Asia only releases, a lot of the same shit you would find at Foot Locker, and occasionally you will even find some boutique only releases that aren’t supposed to be there (Hufs, Recons, etc.). The retail outlets are wack. The mom and pop type stores are where you find the fire. On a good day you’ll find shit that never even makes it onto the blogs, and if it made it onto overseas shelves it was sold out and is on ebay for CAN$1K.

The resell market here is huge, so I don’t know where the kids get the sneakers from, most likely the US or Japan, or maybe even directly from the factories. In China my friends, there are no rules.