About
Sneaker Meetup Parodies refer to a series of TikTok videos parodying sneaker meetups. In the videos, users act out a skit where one person plays a buyer meeting a seller to purchase rare sneakers. The buyer often wants to “finesse” the seller into giving them a good deal. The videos are made to be as absurd as possible, including but not limited to the seller trying to offload items besides sneakers, the buyer and seller performing strange greeting rituals, the buyer wearing something other than shoes throughout the video, and the seller demanding fictional currencies from the buyer.
Origin
Non-parodical sneaker meetup videos are popular on TikTok (example shown below). These videos see buyers meet sneaker resellers in public places to purchase rare, expensive sneakers for the best price possible. Sometime around July 2020, TikTokers started parodying the format of these videos, as well as the cadences of the buyers and sellers, and sneakerheads in general.
On July 25th, 2020, TikToker cuban.chris uploaded a video captioned “sneaker meet up. FINESSED!!!” (Shown below.) The video is absurd from the first moment, with the buyer wearing his flip-flips wrong, and the seller wearing a leather shoe on one foot and a Croc on the other. The buyer asks to kiss the seller after an abnormal handshake. The seller proceeds to throw a pair of sneakers at the buyer’s feet, to which he says in an exaggerated voice, “sheesh,” a staple of future sneaker meetup videos. The buyer refers to the shoes as Supreme Forces when they’re actually used UGGs. The video ends with the buyer “finessing” the seller by paying $200 for three pairs of used shoes. Cuban.chris’ video is one of the first sneaker meetup parodies, and garnered over 2.3 million views and 416 thousand likes in two months.
Spread
On August 6th, 2020, TikToker drewculliton uploaded a sneaker meetup parody, garnering over 2.7 million views in 49 days. On August 13th, TikToker billmemes uploaded a sneaker meetup parody (shown below, left). The video gained over 3.6 million views and 749 thousand likes in just over a month. On August 14th, TikTok page finesseboys, a page specifically made for sneaker meetup parodies, uploaded their first video. The user has uploaded 15 sneaker meetup parodies as of September 24th, with their most popular video garnering over 6.9 million views, and their page boasting over 5.4 million likes as of September 24th (shown below, right).
Sneaker meetup reuploads have also found popularity on YouTube, with a compilation from YouTube page TikTok Compilations garnering over 232 thousand views in a month. As of September 24th, videos under the #sneakermeetup tag have over 197 million total views.
Various Examples
Search Interest
Know Your Meme Store
External References
Source: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneaker-meetup-parodies