Habibi: the Dunk a Dubai shop pitched in a couple of hours
A couple of hours in Amsterdam
Frame is more than a sneaker shop. Peter Ahn, a South Korean who moved to Dubai, opened it in 2017 in the Dubai Design District as a Japanese-style lifestyle store, and it became three businesses under one name: a boutique, a ramen shop and a café. Flatspot calls it the only Club 58 account, Nike SB's partner-shop group, in the Middle East and North Africa.
In early 2019, Nike SB brought shop owners from Europe, the Middle East and Africa to Amsterdam for the Club 58 Summit. Part of it worked like a TV pitch contest: bring your idea for an SB collab and sell it to the room. Plenty of owners wait years for Nike to say yes. Ahn had a couple of hours to put his idea together.
He sent it home to his team and friends in Dubai, and a detailed drawing came back: two Swooshes stacked on top of each other, two tongues, and red, white, black and green. It won.
A shoe that's a map of Dubai
Nike SB's Vault page says every part of the shoe, from the colors to the patterns to the materials, stands for something about Dubai and the UAE. The red, white, black and green echo the country's flag. Inside the tongue, "Habibi" is stitched in. It's Arabic for "my love," and Nike says it shows Frame's pride in its hometown and its love of skateboarding.
Start with the Swoosh. There are two, stacked: a cracked black leather one in front and a thick green corduroy one behind it. Sneaker Bar Detroit says the two unlikely materials are joined to stand for love. Sneaker Freaker thought of sacai's double-Swoosh Nikes; Ahn told Complex that shoe wasn't on his mind. To him, two Swooshes and two tongues meant "the union of complexity and duality."
The rest is Dubai in small print. The diamond ripstop on the side panels stands for the fishing nets that once filled the harbors, and the gum sole is the sand the city rose from. The insole carries an arabesque pattern for the Memorial Fountain, a long-time skate hangout, Complex reports. The frayed red-and-white laces are inspired by the shemagh headdress, and their black tips nod to the agal, the band that holds it in place.
Two tongues, one pearl
Pull the laces and there is a second tongue. The bottom one is black, with an oyster opening to show a pearl, a salute to Dubai's pearl divers. The removable white one on top carries a falcon, for the region's falconry tradition. Together, Frame says, they show men and women as equals, united.
The falcon and the pearl also match the two playable skaters, Falco and Pearl, in the pixel game Frame built for the launch, Flatspot notes.
How you got a pair
The leaks started in early October 2020, and Nike's official photos came out on November 23. Frame's own launch was on December 2, UAE National Day. To enter, shoppers in the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman had to play a browser game called "The Heart of the City," and the ten highest scores got better odds in the draw, according to Inverse.
Everyone else got their shot on December 5, at skate shops and on SNKRS, for $110.
Not everyone cheered
Complex dug into where the shoe came from and found a more complicated story. An Emirati didn't design it: Ahn is a Korean expat, in a country where Emiratis are only about 10 percent of the population. A retailer in the region, who asked not to be named, respected the milestone but wanted more respect for the culture, and pointed at the laces: a houndstooth print, not the real shemagh pattern. Ahn says the laces are meant to evoke the headdress, and needed thicker material than the real thing to be skated in.
The first drawing also had "Nike" written in Arabic on the heel. Frame dropped it because the shoe already had enough ties to the UAE, Ahn said. Complex adds that the Arabic spelling can be read as a rude word, so the cut dodged a problem. And in Qatar, which the UAE had been boycotting since 2017, shoppers couldn't enter Frame's draw at all.
Still, a Kuwaiti blogger told Complex this might be the first SB they'd buy.
Fifty more pairs
That December, the Dubai Future Foundation teamed up with Ahn, whom it calls Frame's founder and creative director, on a special edition: only 50 pairs, in a box printed in English and Arabic, with laser-cut lace accessories shaped like the Frame and Foundation logos. The Foundation called the Dunk the first big Nike collab for a designer based in the UAE.
Why it's a grail
It's Nike SB's first collab from the Middle East, a shop's pitch turned into a $110 Dunk, and it sold out the way every 2020 Dunk did. Within days, Complex had pairs trading at about 400 percent over retail. Nike SB's Vault files it in the striped-box era.
Want a pair now? Search "Frame" in the Grail Call Archive for eBay, StockX and GOAT links, and pin your size so you hear about the next SB drop first.