Julien’s Auctions · live sale, 25 August 2026
The Marshall Mathers Foundation sale. Seven calls — six on the lots sneaker people will chase, and one on the other 111 taken as a single block. It's a charity sale, so it doesn't count toward the record. I'm calling it anyway.
Disclosure: I may bid on lot 1. I'm a collector as well as a researcher, and the stage-worn pair is the one I want. It'll be a game-time decision. The call stands either way, and if I bid I'll say what I paid. This is handled under the standing conflicts rules: I called it above the house's estimate, so bidding is permitted, and if I win it the price gets published.
Live-bid class. Bidding opened before I made these, and every lot already had bids on it. That's a weaker class than a blind call and it gets graded separately — never blended into the blind record.
All calls are hammer. Estimates are quoted hammer, so a hit-or-miss test has to be hammer against hammer or you've won 28% before anyone raises a paddle. Julien's premium is reported at about 28% and I have not had that confirmed, and there may be an online service fee on top. The all-in figures below assume 28% and will move if that's wrong. The hammer call won't.
Lot 1 — Stage-worn Nike Air Max 90 “Soundstorm”, signed
Est $8–12K · at $5,000Worn on stage at MDLBEAST Soundstorm in Riyadh on 12 December 2024, signed in black marker, original box. The only unique object in the whole sale. Everything else here is a production shoe with an autograph on it — this is a one-of-one with a date and a place attached.
Worn beats unworn by 1.75× in my own tape, and a match to a named moment beats a match to an ordinary night. Called above estimate, and it's the only one of the six I've called clear of the house.
All-in at 28%: $14,080–20,480.
Two of these are the same shoe twice. So are two others. That's not a catalogue error — Eminem owned pairs in more than one size — and it turns the sale into an experiment I didn't have to build.
Lot 5 — Air Jordan 3 “Slim Shady” PE, Men's 11.5
Est $25–35K · at $12,500Made for the Super Bowl LVI halftime performance. 45 production pairs, never intended for release, white leather with elephant print, Slim Shady heel tag, reverse E branding. The scarcest and best-storied shoe in the sale, and I still have it under the house.
All-in: $25,600–38,400.
Lot 21 — Air Jordan 3 “Slim Shady” PE, Men's 10.5
Est $25–35K · at $8,000The same shoe as lot 5, one size down, sixteen lots later. Right now the board has them $4,500 apart. I'm calling that gap to close to about two. Nobody is wearing these. They go in a case. When the object is display-only, size stops being the variable it is on a shoe you'd actually put on, and the later slot matters less than it would in a sale people are still warming up in.
If they finish far apart, I'm wrong and size and position matter more than I think. That's a cleaner test than most things I get to run.
All-in: $23,040–35,840.
Lot 9 — Carhartt x Air Jordan 4 promo, Men's 11
Est $15–25K · at $10,0002015, fifteenth anniversary of Shady Records, black duck canvas, signed in gold. I had this at 15 to 25 before I looked at the estimate, and then found the house in the same place.
I don't enjoy agreeing with the auctioneer and I'm not here to give anyone a black eye either. Two independent reads landing on the same number is a reason to keep it, not a reason to move off it to look interesting.
All-in: $19,200–32,000.
Lot 17 — Carhartt x Air Jordan 4 promo, Men's 10
Est $15–25K · at $10,000The second Carhartt pair, one size down. Called identical to lot 9 — same reasoning as the Slim Shadys. These two are already level on the board at $10,000 each, so here the market and I agree from the start.
All-in: $19,200–32,000.
Lot 13 — Air Jordan 4 “Encore” promo, 2017
Est $15–25K · at $8,00023 pairs. A revisit of the 2005 Encore, the shoe that nearly became Jordan Brand's first outside collaboration. The box label suggests it was originally designated for the NFL's Brian Mitchell, which is the kind of detail that makes a lot memorable and doesn't reliably make it expensive.
Scarcer than the Carhartt and called lower, which looks backwards until you notice the resale market has never printed a sale on this shoe at all. There's an ask out there at $25,000 and no transaction behind it. An ask is a wish. Called under the house.
All-in: $15,360–28,160.
Lots 2–117 excluding the six — combined hammer
Est $110–209.4K · at $75,550111 signed shoes, mostly Air Max, mostly estimated at $1,000–2,000 a pair. Retail on a lot of these was around $150. So the estimate is almost entirely signature — which makes this the cleanest measurement in the sale. It's a 111-lot answer to one question: what is Eminem's autograph worth?
Called at $115,000–175,000 hammer, or 1.05 to 1.59 times the aggregate low. That clears the low and stops short of what the comparable sale in my data did.
All-in: $147,200–224,000.
This is a single-owner sale, direct from the name, all proceeds to his foundation. Structurally that's the same animal as the Curry collection I graded in April — and that sale did not behave like an ordinary consignment.
Ordinary consigned sales run 63.5% below low estimate in my data. Curry ran 75.3% at or above, and the whole sale landed at 1.60 times its aggregate low. But the number that matters here is what happened at the bottom of that sale: Curry's cheapest tier ran 2.44 times low — far hotter than the sale overall. In an access sale the cheap lots outperform. They don't lag.
So the fan shoes get called up. I discount it from 2.44 because Curry's cheap lots were still unique game-worn objects, and these are production shoes with a signature. Uniqueness and a signature are not the same good. And for a man reported to rarely sign anything, 117 signatures reaching one room on one morning is the largest supply of his autograph that has ever existed at once.
The six get called down for the same reason inverted. They're carrying estimates that assume scarcity of the shoe and the signature, and the signature isn't scarce today.
Three things, and they're the reason a charity sale I can't score is still worth calling.
One. Access sales, at a second house. I have exactly one graded access sale. One is an anecdote. This is the second data point on the only category in my dataset that runs opposite to everything else.
Two. Two controlled pairs. The same shoe, twice, in the same room, differing only in size and catalogue position. I've measured catalogue position at up to 14.6 times between sales. I've never had a chance to measure it between two lots sixteen numbers apart.
Three. What a signature is worth. 111 shoes where the signature is nearly the whole estimate. Whatever that block does is the answer, and I don't have a better instrument for it anywhere in the dataset.
It also ran on Page Six, Billboard, USA Today and Reuters in the last week. Mainstream coverage reaches people who'd bid $600 on a signed Air Max and not $25,000 on a player exclusive — so if press moves anything here, it should move the 111 and leave the six alone. I'm capturing bid counts across the run to find out rather than guess.
Live floor sale, 10:00 AM Pacific, Los Angeles, with room, phone and online bidding. Online bids are a floor. The room resolves it.
Every call above is hammer. It's a charity sale, so none of it counts toward the record — and I'd rather make seven calls I can't score than skip the most interesting sneaker sale of the year because it doesn't pay me points.