Collections is a series from The Show devoted to the things we acquire and treasure.
Autriya Maneshni’s collection of Converse Chuck Taylor shoes began with a fateful trip to Goodwill when she was in middle school.
Since then, her collection has grown to feature more than a dozen pairs of the classic sneakers.
Maneshni recently visited KJZZ's studio to show off some of her favorite pairs.
Full conversation
AUTRIYA MANESHNI: I'm Autriya Maneshni. I am a recent graduate of Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, and I have 17 pairs of Chuck Taylor Converse.
I've been collecting Converse since I want to say seventh grade in middle school. I have everything from my first ever pair to my newest pair to my really fun Devin Booker shoes that I just got, which was a very, very stressful morning, but I managed to get them, which was great.
I'm a big shoe fanatic. I was always a girl who would have like the fun, cool shoes in school, and I used to be like the girl that would wear like just like regular like sneakers that you would run in. And then one day I went to Goodwill and I found this pair of green and pink Converse. I like to call them my watermelon shoes because that's what they look like.
And then I religiously wore them like every single day in seventh grade, no matter what outfit I was wearing. Did it match? No. Not at all. My sense of style, I hope has improved since then, but I didn't care because I thought they were really cool-looking shoes.
And I guess I really just wanted to have like a fun little legacy of me of like being known as the shoe girl. Every time when someone thinks about me, the first thing that they think of is, oh, Converse, like that's what she loves. That's what she likes to do. I don't think I've ever owned anything in my life that like has really made me feel like myself and until I started wearing Converse. I only own high top Converse. I don't own low top Converse.
The white shoes I always reserve for like work, you know, like I feel like they go with my news anchor dresses to kind of give it a little bit of that professional style while still being comfortable and not having to wear heels. All the other like funky ones I like to wear when my outfits really bland.
For a lot of people, I feel like you know when they're putting on an outfit, it's all about like the accessory or like the purse or you know, like the shirt that you wear. But for me, it's always been about the shoes, like making the shoes the centerpiece of every outfit. And then I realized that I started doing that like to other people, like when someone would walk into the room, the first thing that I would look at is the shoes. And so like if I like those shoes and I'm like, OK, like this person's cool, they got like style.
Some of the pairs have stories. So like the first one that I can see are my very beat up, just like regular black and white Chuck Taylors. I wore this all the way through eighth grade, basically, but because I wore them so much, they started falling apart and so that year, instead of buying a yearbook, I decided to just kind of like give people a Sharpie and have them sign my shoes. And so I'm looking around and all these people like I still talk to or some of them have moved away from Arizona and are going to college and it's crazy. Like my best friends are still on here.
A lot of these shoes actually, they come from Iran. So my mom, when she would go back, she found this like big shopping mall in Iran and all they sell is Converse, which was just like heaven for me. And I remember one trip when I went back home, I went into the store and the guy was like, “OK, you're the girl, you're the girl who your mom continuously buys Converse for. I'm so glad I'm finally meeting you in person.” And it was really cool.
So like a lot of the unique styles that I have here, you actually are not going to find on that Converse website. That also made it really fun for people when they would ask me like, “hey, where did you get your shoes?” And I'd be like, “oh, actually you can't get them because I got them back home from Iran. Sorry, not sorry.”
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