Brick by brick, step by step, De’Aaron Fox is building.
There’s his team, the Sacramento Kings. He’s their clutch architect, entrusted with the responsibility of winning close games. He’s so nice with that part. So nice that he was fifth in total clutch points scored last season and third in most clutch field goals made, too.
He’s the Kings’ offensive foundation in all the other moments of the game. He breaks defensive walls with speed that scares. Got defenders looking like the Popeyes lady. They can’t catch him or their breath. He makes dudes in their mid-20s look like grey beards at the barber shop, the ones talking about how nice they used to be. But he’s really that nice.
He’s got five straight seasons of 20-plus points per game to his name. And with how he’s stacked the improvement of his career, the numbers don’t illustrate the way he’s pieced everything together.
Bop, bop–quick cross. He’s found space. Lots of it. Could be a faster-than-light pull from the midrange. Defender won’t even get their hand up. That kind of speed. Could be a left-handed smash at the rim over a skyscraper. One of those dunks where his legs kick back behind him. Something to see the Flow outsole real good. Could be a dish to one of the many shooters that now call Sacramento home. Could be a drop-off to the big. But it will be a bucket. And it will be rapid.
Alright, offense orchestrated. Time for defense. The kind of defense that some coach in the middle of the country is gonna show their star player. “See, see, this is that desire,” he’s gonna say. “You play like this? You play like this? You’re gonna make it.” He’s gonna almost plead with the kid. He’s gonna show Fox picking up three-quarter court, sitting on the point guard’s strong hand. When that point guard does a lazy spin move to try and get back to his dominant side, Fox will pick him on the turn. Boom. Bye bye. Another bucket.
That’s the way Fox has been upping his game. He’s got the Kings in prime position to scare the daylights out of the West.
But it’s the night lights that are coming to define this All-Star. There’s the beam. It gets lit every time the Kings win a game. It rises high through the Sacramento sky, a vertical line of purple, built as a warning shot.
Not night lights of the city, though. Nah, not those kinds that are made for social outings. He intimately knows the night lights of weight rooms, of empty gyms, of phone screens. After the workouts that nobody sees, Fox has been building something else. He’s been working on the Fox 1 by Curry Brand.
Now all those texts messages, emails and FaceTimes back and forth with Ed Wallace, Senior Designer at Curry Brand and Under Armour, have been realized in a physical product.
The Fox 1 by Curry Brand is here.
A Friday under the daylight of Rancho Cordova, CA, is where all the time under the night lights pays off. Fox, along with his wife Recee and their daughter Poppy, saunters into the athletic facility where we’ve set up our cameras. Fox gets his hair cut by Kevin McClain of Skills Barbershop. Recee eats some lunch. And three colorways of the Fox 1 are waiting for all of us.
The “Happy Fox Day” is a blue/orange joint inspired by one of Fox’s favorite Christmas movies, Jingle Jangle. The purple/green “Light the Beam” is an homage to the aforementioned winning signal that shines over Sac-Town.
No. 5’s favorite edition of the trio we have here on set is the “Happy Fox Day Alt.” It’s a green option, also inspired by that same movie. Green is the lefty’s favorite color and it induces a vocal reaction from him when he sees it.
Slowly, without even realizing it, Fox has been working on a database of colorway ideas. He loves video games, he loves anime and he loves his kids. Those are just the foundations for what we’ll see on the Fox 1.
“Ed would come to me and ask, you know, five, six, seven different questions and then you give him an answer and I’m thinking, I don’t know what the hell he’s gonna do with that answer,” Fox says. “Then he comes back with, like, 75 different concepts of the 10 things that you might have told him. So just how the creative people are behind the scenes, just having him take those words, come back, you know, a week or two later and putting them on a paper and then asking, you know, Which ones do you like? That process was crazy.”
Wallace heard a lot about Dragon Ball Z and Avatar in his early conversations with Fox. They started to make him PEs of the Curry 1, Curry 2 and the Curry 4 that were callouts to some of his interests, including one for his son, Reign. But as Wallace got to work on the signature, things took an unexpected turn.
“I started looking at more animals, like foxes,” he says. “Normally I wouldn’t have a reason to do that. It’s just something I thought about. Like, This can be cool to put a little fur up there [on the tongue] and having a strap as I was thinking about speed and brought that to a point [where] I was like, I can make this look like a little fox tail. So those were the things I never explored before.”
The Fox 1’s defining design piece is the midfoot strap. Each of these different colorways has a different visual across the strap. It’s something De’Aaron had always wanted, ever since he was playing in Under Armour silhouettes as a middle schooler.
“A big thing for me was having a strap,” Fox says. “One of my favorite shoes to play in growing up was the Bloodlines with Brandon Jennings. That and the Black Ices. The Black Ices also had a strap, too. Those were kind of the concepts that I thought about. I didn’t know what the strap would look like exactly, but when going through the process, I’m like, That’s a big thing for me.”
Wallace, who is also the lead designer on the Curry line, said that he initially sat down with Fox at a photo shoot for the Curry 11. Fox mentioned then that he wanted a strap. Wallace ended up with a fixed strap and a two-mesh upper, along with no-sew wrapping near the toe area and a heel overlay that provides support under the heel. The traction is powered by Flow, the mainstay cushioning for No. 30 since the Curry 8. Curry Brand’s innovators found out how to remove rubber from their products, resulting in premium grip on the outsole. The Brand’s namesake is always heavily involved in the sneaker creation process. But he wasn’t for this one and it resulted in an amazing memory.
“When we were in China actually, he hadn’t seen the shoe yet,” Fox says about the trip that he accompanied Stephen Curry on in September. “So when we were in China, we were about to lift in the hotel and he was like, Yo, you got your shoe? I’m like, No, I don’t got them on me. He was like, Damn, I wanna see them.”
When he finally did see them, it was a wrap.
“He didn’t let them go,” Fox continues. “We went through a whole workout actually, he was, like, holding them, putting them down, doing his thing and then, like, [he’d] be looking at them… Like, Steph’s 10 years older than me, right? I think he’s played eight more years than me. But I watched—I was in high school when Steph won his first MVP, when he won his first championship. Since I’ve gotten to a certain level, I’ve never really, like, necessarily idolized guys. But then when we went on that trip, I’m, like, Steph is on a different level. The way that people react when they get around Steph is, like… But then when you actually see it, we can’t even walk through an airport. Just being around someone of that stature and then seeing him love the product that has my name and my logo on it is just, like, that’s a different feeling, too.”
It won’t be the last time that Fox sees someone wearing his sneaker. He’s already heard from teammates and opponents about the silhouette, although it was just preseason by the time we went to print. He wants to see them on teammates, on his opponents and on fans in the streets.
“We knew we had to bring a lot of energy and make the shoe fun,” Wallace says. “He also talked about wanting to make the shoe look fast. We know his playing style, so we knew that we needed the shoe to look fast, and he also mentioned that he wanted it to look runner-esque.”
Fox and his close friend Reno have also been mentioning that they’re trying to usher in a bygone era with the Fox 1’s aesthetics.
“Reno definitely was the most excited,” Fox says. “We kind of knew how we wanted it to look a little bit. He was like, I’m wearing them with jeans, [with] sweats. I’m bringing back the wearing basketball shoes with jeans.
“I’m like, yeah, I want a shoe that you don’t only wear on the basketball court because especially, like I said, this day and age, people aren’t going to buy basketball shoes to not play in them. So we wanna kinda have that. We wanna try to have the best of both worlds.”
So Fox is building with the Kings and with his signature sneaker. And Curry Brand is building out their larger family.
That’s the key word—family.
Type of family that goes all the way to China and then comes back for a barbecue on a Sunday afternoon. Where Canon Curry plays around with Reign Fox. Where No. 30 and No. 5 go head-to-head in postseason matchups and then hug it out afterward. Curry Brand is a family, where athletic gifts take a backseat to morals.
“I couldn’t think of a better athlete and person to join the Curry Brand team,” the best shooter ever says of Fox. “To have somebody that believes in what you’re doing, believes in what the brand stands for, and believes in not just being a Curry Brand athlete, but taking that and building that into your identity as a player is special. And that’s exactly why we chose De’Aaron—he believes in Curry Brand and our mission as much as he believes in himself on the court. I’m grateful to have a partner that is so dedicated to our brand and invested in what our collective future holds.”
What does that future hold? Lots and lots more clutch shots. Lots and lots more speed that scares. Lots and lots more steals. And lots and lots more Fox 1 colorways. Because brick by brick, step by step, De’Aaron Fox is building.
Portraits by Atiba Jefferson.
