Somewhere in the press pack for the Converse x Palmes Jack Purcell PDM there is a photograph that has almost nothing to do with the collaboration. It is a screenshot from Nikolaj Hansson's Instagram, taken in 2012, and it shows him skating in a pair of Jack Purcells in Denmark.

"I just liked them," he says, "and I was like, I'm gonna skate in them."

Fourteen years on, he has designed one.

Hansson is on a call from New York, where the week is stacked. He is taking a group out to the US Open tomorrow. At the weekend he and his team are building a vintage tennis shop in the city. He founded Palmes in 2021, after quitting a job in magazines, and the company is still him and four other people.

The Converse relationship started in a way that alot of people in fashion dream of.

"Converse sent us an email," he says. "Like, just a cold email, which was incredible. And I think they're taking notice of us because of what we've been doing in the tennis space."

Palmes had been retailing Converse in its own Copenhagen shop for a while, Chuck Hi and Chuck 70 OX sitting alongside Japanese loafers. But the pitch, when it came, was not about tennis at all. On the first call Hansson told the Converse team he had grown up skating, and that he had built Palmes by asking a slightly odd question: what if a skate brand was tennis? The point, he said, was the thing skateboarding does better than any sport on earth, which is give back to the culture it is built on.

"And they were like, now it makes sense. We're all skaters. This is why there was something we really liked about this."

He went to Boston about a year ago to meet the Converse archivist, who he describes as an absolute legend. He got to handle Jack Purcells going back to the 1930s and 1940s, including pairs from the Mackintosh collaboration Converse ran back in 2011, which he owned at the time.

"I really just wanted to keep it clean," he says. "It is an icon, and it's also an icon that's been gone for a little while, and we really just want to show people what it is. My pure feeling of the Jack Purcell, and not too many things around it."

What he did take from the archives was small enough to miss. On a pair from the thirties or forties he found a coarse cotton webbing at the heel, and had it sourced one to one. It sits on the heel of both colourways, the navy suede Parisian Night and the faded green canvas Mountain View.

"It's such a subtle, nerdy detail, but it's one of my favourite things, because it really ties the whole history from almost 100 years ago to today."

The rest of the design argument is about damage. Hansson has said before that he wants clothes that look lived in, and here the instruction is unusually direct: he would like you to wreck these.

On Sale Now

Issue 09

Available now

"I want people to wear them. I want people to beat them up, because every single scuff mark on it makes it all the more yours."

He traces that back to skating too, and to a specific teenage embarrassment. Turning up at the skate park in new shoes made him feel like a poser. He still feels it now, on the clay courts in Copenhagen, in a fresh pair. A few weeks ago he played in new shoes and hated it.

"It looks like this is my first day as a tourist."

I mention that most other brands are the reverse, they look their best unworn, still in the box. You barely even want to wear them so they aren't scuffed.

"It's where things go from being a product to being a belonging. It's when you put your own wear to it."

He means this literally. He can read a skater's style off the wear marks on their shoes, he says, the way you might read handwriting: evidence of how you express yourself. He owns a skate T-shirt with so many holes in it that his own employees have banned it from the office. He still plays tennis in it.

The Jack Purcell arrived in the 1930s as a badminton shoe and got adopted by tennis players by accident, back when the structural demands of court footwear were on another planet from where they are now. What survives is not the function. It is the range.

"I like how the Jack Purcell moves from the skate park to the tennis court to the French club to the street so effortlessly. Normally, if you're at the skate park you don't go to the tennis club, and vice versa. But the Jack Purcell can go and do both."

He is not precious about who buys it. He describes a man in his mid forties with a corporate job who sails at weekends, and he describes skate kids in every city in the world, and he is happy for both.

"I hope that people buy the shoe for skating, even though it's not a skate shoe. Because it just works."

I asked what PDM stands for...it's pronounced podium. It is Converse's model designation, the way the Chuck Taylor has its own naming conventions, and it sits below the pinnacle First String tier that launched earlier this month.

The shoe lands on 14 September. The weekend before, in the New York shop, Hansson is putting one of the oldest pairs Converse owns in a case next to his own beaten-up pair.

"The beauty of it is that you can't really tell which is made six months ago and which is 94 years old."

Converse x Palmes Jack Purcell PDM is available from 14th September at https://palmes.co/