This Louis Vuitton sneaker is Silicon Valley's latest status symbol

What if I were to tell you that the most happening sneaker on the red-hot resale market wasn’t a $1,269 pair of Adidas Yeezy Boosts or a $1,515 retro Air Jordan design, but a high-top released by a French brand known for leather travel trunks and monogrammed handbags?
 
At the moment, rare and high-end sneakers are so highly valued that their re-sale prices can exceed the original sticker price. Shoppers most often find pre-owned kicks on sites like Stock X or eBay, where a bid of $1,750 might win a pair of Nike 4 Graffiti NYC Lebron basketball shoes. There is another market, though, for sneakers made by fashion brands such as Lanvin and Gucci.
 
One example is the Real Real, an online luxury shop where you can find a vintage Hermès bag, a set of Lalique Champagne flutes, and a $1,200 pair of black nylon Chanel high-tops with tonal stitching, contrasting rubber soles, and quilted leather insoles. This is a meaningful indicator for fashion brands, which can offer steeper markups on the accessories that make up a key part of their profit margins.
 
To find out which of these are actually highly sought after, we asked the Real Real to give us a geographic break-down of its top-selling sneakers.
 
As a whole, anti-flashy white low-tops dominate. In New York, and in the nation at large, the Real Real’s best-seller is the Common Projects Achilles low-top.
 
Made in Italy since 2004, the Common Projects shoe is a durable, smartly constructed sneaker that refuses to go out of style. It’s simpler than a Stan Smith and, starting at $375, is only about five times the price. Part of its beauty is its inconspicuousness. No one will ever say, “What are those?,” largely is because anyone inclined to do so already knows.
 
A San Francisco treat
 
But when the Real Real broke down the data to focus only on San Francisco and Silicon Valley, a list otherwise marked by the minimalism of Lanvin and Givenchy shoes revealed an outlier at the top spot: the Louis Vuitton Damier high-top.
 
Louis Vuitton has produced the shoe in many styles, but they all share the same basic scheme, and the Graphite Heroes model pictured here is, on the Real Real, is the most popular style of the most popular sneaker in San Francisco and its techiest environs.
 
This flamboyant version of the shoe — resembling as it does a hybrid of a vintage Ponys and a pair of Vans — is no longer in production. While you can find its former retail price listed as $745, Graham Wetzbarger, the Real Real’s head of authentication, says that $515 should be closer to the mark. He dates its debut to the fall 2008 collection: “It was the Marc Jacobs era under menswear designer Paul Helbers who was at Louis Vuitton until 2011.”
 
And in this context, the checkered pattern (an LV logotype since 1888) encourages comparison to another, different style of Vans. In other situations, these shoes might invite comparisons to ladies’ handbags, but the creators of this distinctive pattern seem to have stumbled into a sweet spot and accidentally created the Bay Area’s most high-end skater shoe. 

Bloomberg