In Oakland, sneakers aren’t just shoes but ‘beautiful pieces of wearable art.’

Misty Rose sat in concentration, threading, measuring, and cutting as she re-soled an old pair of Chuck Taylor Converse by hand. She was transforming the worn-out sneakers, which her niece had nearly thrown into the trash, into something brand new with a leather toe cap and chunky Vibram sole. 

Rose is a leatherworker and designer in Oakland. Her business, MzzTrzz, specializes in locally based shoemaking material and tool distribution for home crafters and artists. Rose demonstrated her sneaker refurbishing, or “upcycling,” techniques during Oakland’s second annual Art of Sneakers event, which showcased 22 artists and businesses in October. 

“A lot of the artists here today have recycled a shoe or created an existing thing into something else,” Rose said. Instead of letting shoes rot in the dump, they’ve transformed them into “beautiful pieces of wearable art.”

The event was part of Oakland Style Week, highlighting the city’s DIY, art-forward sneaker culture, which extends far beyond collectable Jordans and designer tags. With longstanding ties to street fashion and grassroots movements, the city has become a hub for independent designers, sustainability-focused artists and local businesses that quietly influence the broader sneaker scene.

“Oakland is kind of a slept-on cultural driver for the whole country and you could say globally,” said Jeff Perlstein, Art of Sneakers host and co-founder of SoleSpace Labs, an organization that teaches sneaker repair workshops. 

Oakland’s sneaker culture, Perlstein said, is also political, with roots in movements like the Black Panthers. “Their particular style, interwoven with their politics and their understanding of the importance of cultural work and making social change, that kind of undergirds a lot of what we do,” he said. 

Oakland’s creativity derives from its activism, which makes the community special, said Brittany Abangan, a self-described sneakerhead and organizer of SneakHER Supper, which invites women to celebrate fashion and culture over food and drinks. “You see a lot of that in the way that we dress, in the way that we carry ourselves, especially in the creative community,” she said. 

Abangan hopes SneakHER Supper will help establish Oakland as a “fashion house” and bring in more local sneaker-oriented events.

“We feel like we always have to go outside of the Bay area to kind of get that culture,” she said. “I know that we’re here. But we just don’t know how to find each other.”

Andrés Salerno, aka Stepkicks510 or Stepwise, had three shoes on display at the Art of Sneakers. Each pair was inspired by the famed “what the” design. Essentially a “Frankenstein” combination of different patterns and colors, the concept originated with Nike releases across different sneaker models and athlete collaborations. The event was a rare chance, Salerno said, to physically meet fellow sneaker artists that he had interacted with online. 

“It’s really nice to come together with a bunch of other people that are in this pretty niche world,” he said. 

In contrast to larger markets like New York City or Los Angeles, Oakland’s sneaker scene revolves around indie creators and their grassroots innovations. It is less fixated on celebrity endorsements and sneaker collecting or reselling than it is on social commentary and identity. 

At the Art of Sneakers, that was evident in an Air Jordan 1 made entirely from biomaterials, stilettos made from deconstructed Nikes and a “floating cleat pyramid” designed by artist Dania Cabello. The latter was an extension of Cabello’s previous project called “memory and motion,” which began as a community altar made from 313 soccer balls dedicated to people who had died.

“‘Memory and motion honors the transient nature of this life — that we’re here one minute, we’re gone the next. You have a physical object one minute, in this case it’s soccer cleats, that will be donated and they’ll pass forward to another athlete eventually,” said Cabello. 

In Oakland, sneakers are not just products. They are an outlet for creation, expression and cultural impact enjoyed by a community sharing a love for shoes. Here, sneaker creators are turning the leather and rubber underneath their feet into something human.

Oakland police make arrest in ‘targeted’ killing of Laney Coach John Beam