Around the end of March, Lil Nas X sparked outrage on social media when the singer announced he had collaborated with MSCHF, a conceptual art collective known for a wide range of interventions engaging fashion, art and technology, to create a pair of unique sneakers.
Dubbed "Satan Shoes" and limited to 666 pairs retailing at $1,018, the sneakers in question are a modified pair of Nike Air Max 97 with a pentagram pendant and a reference to a verse from the Gospel of Luke - "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (10:18). The shoes also contain 60cc of red ink, visible from the transparent section of the sole and "one drop of human blood". All pairs were sold out as soon as they went on sale, and Miley Cyrus was spotted on her Instagram account wearing a pre-sale pair.
The shoes also have a connection with Lil Nas X's song and video "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)" that features the singer sliding down to hell on a lap dancing pole and seducing the devil (who is wearing the sneakers...) before killing Satan and taking his place.
Soon after the announcement about the shoes, all hell literally broke loose: religious and conservative consumers, thinking this was an official collaboration with Nike, called for a boycott; then Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota and a member of the Republican party, wrote on her personal Twitter account: "This is outrageous, disgusting and perverted and on #PalmSunday no less. Somehow @lilnasx thinks that Satanic worship should be mainstream and normal. I don’t think there have been better candidates to cancel than Lil Nas X and these shoes."
She then added on her official account as a governor: "Our kids are being told that this kind of product is not only OK, it's 'exclusive'. But do you know what's more exclusive? Their God-given eternal soul. We are in a fight for the soul of our nation. We need to fight hard. And we need to fight smart. We have to win."
In response, the singer tweeted: "You are a whole governor and you [are] on here tweeting about some damn shoes. Do your job!" But before that Lil Nas X posted a message to "apologise" about the shoes featuring a clip from the "Montero" video.
In the meantime, Nike distanced itself from the product and sued MSCHF over the custom-made shoes for "trademark infringement and dilution, false designation of origin, and unfair competition". Lil Nas X was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and Nike highlighted how the sneakers were produced without its approval and authorization and that the brand was "in no way connected with this project".
Nike added: "There is already evidence of significant confusion and dilution occurring in the marketplace, including calls to boycott Nike in response to the launch of MSCHF's Satan Shoes based on the mistaken belief that Nike has authorized or approved this product."
Nike therefore asked the court to immediately stop MSCHF from fulfilling orders for the shoes and requested a jury trial to seek damages.
In an official statement MSCHF said they were surprised by Nike's reaction, considering how they highlighted that the "Satan Shoes" are not affiliated with Nike, something that they have reiterated in the press and that they were conceived as "art created for people to observe, speculate on, purchase, and own."
It's interesting to note how the "Satan Shoes" are actually a follow up of the "Jesus Shoes", released in 2019 by MSCHF, a customized Nike Air Max 97 sneaker filled with holy water from the Jordan River. MSCHF often focuses on products like shoes, books, painting and sculpture but also apps to spark a conversation about consumer culture and make a critique of the system.
The "Jesus Shoes" were indeed a way to comment about brand worship and religious worship. When they were released Nike didn't seem to react as badly as this time as MSCHF's "Jesus Shoes" were not perceived as offensive and divisive, while the "Satan Shoes" triggered a media frenzy.
"Heresy only exists in relation to doctrine: who is Nike to censor one but not the other?" MSCHF wondered in an official statement mentioning the different way the Jesus and Satan shoes were received by Nike.
In a letter dated 31st March 2021, the lawyers of MSCHF explained to the judge that the "Satan Shoes" were conceived "as a way to criticize the everpopular 'collab culture,' where brands like Nike collaborate with anyone willing, to make a splash," but they also wanted to "criticize social norms that discriminate, such as religious norms that marginalize certain groups of people. Lil Nas X, a gay Black artist who has publicly discussed how he spent his teenage years hating himself because of what Christianity taught about homosexuality, and whose most recent video prominently features Satan, is thus the perfect collaborator for these shoes."
Eventually last week US district judge Eric Komitee gave Nike a temporary restraining order preventing manufacturer MSCHF from shipping out the 666 pairs of the shoes to customers. Nike managed to submit enough evidence that even passionate fans and consumers - "sophisticated sneakerheads" - were confused by the shoes and thought they were made by Nike and they claimed they would never buy Nike shoes again.
MSCHF actually answered to this point stating how the confusion is unlikely because of the "sophistication" of the Nike customer and replied with "The Rogers Test", so named after the Rogers Vs Grimaldi copyright case (1989).
This is an interesting trademark and intellectual freedom case, referring to Ginger Rogers who sued Alberto Grimaldi and MGM for production and distribution of the 1986 Federico Fellini film "Ginger and Fred", that featured a cabaret couple, Pippo and Amelia, emulating Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In that case Rogers claimed that the film violated her Lanham Act trademark rights, right of publicity and was a "false light" defamation. But the Second Circuit, on appeal, highlighted that Rogers' right to protect her celebrated name was clashing with the right of others to express themselves freely in their own artistic work. The Second Circuit eventually found Grimaldi not liable as suppressing an artistically relevant film on trademark grounds would "unduly restrict expression." The court stated therefore that "section 43(a) of the Lanham Act does not bar a minimally relevant use of a celebrity's name in the title of an artistic work where the title does not explicitly denote authorship, sponsorship, or endorsement by the celebrity or explicitly mislead as to content."
While the order will stand until a more in-depth trial, MSCHF's attorneys argued that the shoes are "not typical sneakers, but rather individually-numbered works of art" sold to collectors and that, like in the case of the "Jesus Shoes", will probably be exhibited in museums and collections.
What could the consequences be of such a lawsuit if Nike comes out as the winner? Well, there is a vast market for customised yet unauthorised shoes, and if a judge rules in favour of Nike, it would become impossible to make custom sneakers, reinvent old ones or radically transform them, in a nutshell it wouldn't be possible to use Nike's shoes as a canvas like MSCHF did. On the other hand if MSCHF prevails instead (and Nike doesn't take into account the Jesus sneakers as in court papers the brand left open the possibility of amending its complaint to include a claim over the "Jesus Shoes" too), MSCHF will probably continue to release its unofficial products (one way to avoid more lawsuits from Nike would be to eliminate its iconic swoosh from the reinvented shoe).
In a way all the satanic panic and the debate about the devil's shoes sounds a bit superficial: in world in turmoil because of a global pandemic that has been causing a health emergency and social and financial instability, quarrelling over Lil Nas X's pole dancing down to hell in his unapologetically queer video or his Satan shoes in collaboration with MSCHF as if both were sources of sin and damnation (in which case also the publisher of the novel "Call Me by Your Name" by André Aciman on which Luca Guadagnino's eponymous film is based should sue Lil Nas X...) for young people (who are dealing with much more serious issues...including the pandemic, the fact that most of them haven't been vaccinated yet and they don't know when this may happen, climate change, pollution and reckless consumption...just to mention a few of them), sounds rather useless (and actually there is also a very scholarly moment in Lil Nas X's video with the quote "ἐπειδὴ οὖν ἡ φύσις δίχα ἐτμήθη, ποθοῦν ἕκαστον τὸ ἥμισυ τὸ αὑτοῦ συνῄει," meaning "because from the moment nature (man) was cut in two pieces, each piece longs for its other half", from Plato's Symposium, a reference to the fact that it's human’s destiny to long for your missing part and find you soulmate; guess that maybe if I had seen such a quote in a music video as a teenager I would have certainly excelled in classical Greek...).
There is an interesting point about all this story: the main preoccupation of Nike, a brand operating inside the garment industry that is definitely not the most ethical industry out there when you think about workers being exploited and such likes, seems to have been about trademark confusion and dilution, while not many seemed too worried about the alleged drop of human blood (donated by members of the MSCHF art collective) contained in the shoes (do they actually contain it? Probably not, but in case they do, while it may be possible to incorporate human blood in a work of art, is it possible to ship a product containing human blood all over the world? Would there be any restrictions?).
MSCHF and Lil Nas X may have avoided all this hellish debate by releasing a trilogy of shoes dedicated to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and make them pass as a tribute to Dante's 700th death anniversary - Wall's Magnum did so with a limited edition of its famous ice cream. In this way MSCHF and Lil Nas X may have got less attention than they did with the Satan Shoes, but surely neither Nike nor Dante would have sued any of them.
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