21st Century Hustle

via nytimes.com

Asio Highsmith does not want to sell you a pair of shoes. He wants to sell you a lifestyle. He wants to sell you your life.

When you walk into his Pedigree Sneaker Gallery, soon to open on Willoughby near Adelphi, wedged between the pet-supply store Who’s Your Doggy and the laid-back BidonVille café, Mr. Highsmith or one of his appointed acolytes will seat you at a computer and administer a 100-item questionnaire about every pair of shoes you have ever owned, your favorite colors, your high school’s colors, your college colors, and significant dates, places and people in your life.

From this information, he will generate your Lifetime Style Heritage.

He will then scour the Internet and his fetishist’s knowledge of sneaker-maker back catalogs and track down your perfect shoe. Or perhaps he will recommend that one of the young artists he plans to retain draw a custom design on a shoe for you.

You will pay serious money for this — $600, $700, $800– because, Mr. Highsmith says, he will have written your cellular autobiography in footwear form.

“That’s what pedigree is,” Mr. Highsmith said yesterday morning outside his storefront, which he hopes to open in early summer. “Pedigree is the search for particular traits in an organism. I’m looking for a particular shoe trait in you that I can impose on you and on a shoe. Read entire story @ nytimes.com

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