How $20,000 1985 Chicago Air Jordan 1s are professionally resoled

• The Cobblers is a shoe-repair shop in Miami.
• The shoe it's working on today is a rare pair of 1985 Chicago Air Jordan 1s.
  
  
• Its cobblers are going to show us how they replace the soles for this pair of shoes.

The following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: My name is Derrick Winje. I am the director of sneaker operations at The Cobblers in Miami, Florida. Today, we're gonna be sole-swapping a original 1985 pair of Jordan Chicago 1s with a donor sole. And these actually released in 1985, with a retail of just $65. For reference, the same pair in 1985 for $65 is now in the aftermarket, brand new, for about $20,000, and that's if you can even find a pair. The first step that we need to do is acquire a donor shoe. In this case, the client had provided a donor shoe, which is actually the 2015 Retro, which is merely just a rerelease of the shoe. On this particular pair, the customer requested that we leave the upper of the shoe, which is all of the leather. He did not want it cleaned. He did not want it painted. He didn't want any conditioners. So we need to carefully take off the sole without, you know, damaging the sole or altering anything.

In this case, the upper of the donor shoe is not as important, but sometimes we use those parts for other things. So, what I like to start with is just using heat and acetone. Ideally, I'll pour the acetone inside of the shoe to actually loosen up the glue that is on the footbed and the sidewalls of the shoe to kind of break that down to give me an entry point in the side. Once we're able to get to that layer of stitching on the sidewalls, we can then use an X-Acto knife, as you see I'm using here, or you can also use a seam ripper to undo those stitches. Once the sidewall and stitching is undone, it should be pretty easy from there. We can either just pull the upper apart or continue using heat or the acetone to break up that glue to separate the sole from the upper here. It's a similar process to remove the original upper from the sole, if it's not already detached. In this case, there is stitching here, as you can see. However, we don't want to use excess heat, and we also definitely don't want to pour acetone into the shoe, as that would damage the upper of the original. On the sides here, you'll see that I use a bone folder, which is just bone from an animal. It's just a -- not a sharp edge, but a blunt enough edge that I can open up the sidewalls to get down into that stitching there. Once the two pieces are completely separated, we're going to remove all of the dust and crumbling inside of the original shoe, as well as from the upper, to prepare this upper of the original shoe to be put on the donor shoe.

We use a contact cement. It is made for shoes. It is flexible. It's clear. So it's perfect for what we're doing here. And it's very important with any type of restoration we do, when we're working with glue, especially in this case, that we get a clean surface and get that fully prepped and all of the old glue, any dust or any buildup, oil, water that may have seeped into that shoe. The reasoning for this is because if we don't have a clean surface for the glue to adhere to, the glue is not gonna fully do its job in holding that shoe together for the longest period of time. We will apply one thin layer to the upper, in this case, as well as on the sole of the donor shoe, and we allow that to dry. A tip that I like to use is actually to let this glue overcure, so it gives me more time to fit the sneaker, as opposed to having to put it all together in one shot. And this, again, is so we can line up the upper properly on the sole, so there's no distinction between the original sole and the donor sole being lined up on this 1985.

Once we have heated up the glue and pressed it with our hand to make sure everything is fitting properly, we will then just double-check and make sure everything is lined up the way we like, so everything looks original. We'll then take the original last from the shoe, which is just the interior of the shoe, if you can think of it as what shoemakers use to make and shape shoes. We'll place that into the shoe, and then we will take it over to the bladder press. What the bladder press is gonna do is basically give us that extra security and push the shoe together and make sure that the glue is fully bonded and has a strong hold to it.

Once we're done, you can see here that we actually stitch by hand. There is a machine, but with something this delicate and this fragile and rare, we actually prefer stitching it by hand, just so we know that every stitch is fit perfectly into the original hole to make things look as original as possible. So, you can see, this isn't a pure white thread we're using. We actually have an aged or more of a vanilla cream thread, which is gonna match the original look of that shoe. If we were to put a bright, brilliant white lace or thread in there, it would kind of take away from the originality of keeping the upper a little distressed and having the sole looking brand new on top of an old, distressed 1985 shoe. We actually add a little bit of wax here, to imitate the original shoe upon release. Now that everything's stitched up, it may not be mind-blowing before and after just putting a sole onto a new shoe, but to us, in these little details, this makes the shoe complete, and I think the customer is gonna be very happy with these results.