Think rabid fans of late author Hunter S. Thompson and knee-jerk bloggers are hyperventilating over Converse's use of his image in their ad campaign? Wait until they find out Thompson's estate started talking with the shoe company shortly after the gonzo writer fatally shot himself in 2005 about an HST edition Chuck Taylor low-top.

Thompson was hardly a fashion icon, and by no means a clotheshorse. He did, however, have a look: aviator sunglasses, the occasional Hawaiian shirt, cigarette holder fitted with a smoldering Dunhill, and a Tilley hat crushed down upon his near-bald pate (with a convenient secret stash compartment under the crown)—and white, Chuck Taylor All-Star low-cut sneakers by Converse.

"Since he bought his first pair in the early 1960s in San Francisco he has worn them every day of his life," the author's widow Anita Thompson tells Radar. "There are still over 70 pairs of them at the house."

That hasn't stopped some from crying "sellout." And it's tough to tell whether Hunter himself would have approved of the endorsement. He was never against making a fast buck. He always loved schemes, but was always generous and never greedy. In the 1970s, he had no problem posing for Levi photo ads. In 1999, when I convinced Porsche to loan him a new car to test drive for a review in the San Francisco Examiner Magazine, he got slapped for shilling. And he could've given a fuck. He thanked me. We talked on the phone for years afterward.

"Anyone using the quaint expression 'sellout' in a discussion involving sneaker marketing and Hunter S. Thompson is living in a prelapsarian dream state," Men's Vogue editor Corey Seymour says—along with Jann Wenner, he edited Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson. "When I was reporting and interviewing for the oral history, artist and Thompson cohort Ralph Steadman told me about the time in the early '90s when Hunter was doing these William Burroughs-style shotgun-art portraits of people like John Wayne, Jann, Marilyn Monroe, J. Edgar Hoover, etc. During this time, Hunter's mantra, which he kept repeating to Ralph again and again, was, 'It's not art until it's sold.'"

There has been talk about Steadman being involved with the ad campaign. (He's done spots with Nike, the company that bought Converse in 2003 for $305 million.) The artist was unavailable for comment. Calls to Converse for comment on the rumored shoe were not immediately returned.

According to Mrs. Thompson, the late George Plimpton once said the sneakers created Thompson's infamous loping walk. Plimpton said that when Thompson bought his first pair in the early 1960s, the salesman lied to him and sold him the wrong size. To compensate for the over-sized sneaks, Thompson developed a sweeping swagger—imitated by many, but perfected only by Bill Murray and Johnny Depp in their respective biopics. It is also true that one leg was longer than the other, which clearly added to his titling gait.

The new gonzo sneaker idea grew from correspondence between Converse and Thompson while the author was having severe back problems. He asked Converse to make a special version of the sneakers to provide more comfort and better back support. Soon, a pair of sneakers arrived with extra padding—just what the doctor ordered. Though adding additional cushion and padding to the sneaker, which is fairly primitive, flat-footed, and floppy and without support, the custom work was merely putting lipstick on a pig. The altered new kicks were better, but hardly a cure for Thompson's physical problems.

Seymour adds: "Doesn't seem to me these ads are anything approaching art— Hunter only wore white Converse (a number of which flew by my head at high speed during our time together, either as punishment for some unspecified infraction or as a warning shot of some sort), for starters, and his image in the ad doesn't begin to capture his stylishness—but perhaps he's looking down on this as a sort of postmortem payment to offset the thousands of times the expression 'Fear and Loathing in ...' has been co-opted. I told him once that he should have trademarked 'Fear and Loathing' like [Pat Riley] trademarked 'three-peat.' All he had to say was that 'Somebody owes me a lot of money, that's for damn sure.'"

For those that agree, there are available through Thompson's retail website www.gonzostore.com thongs, coffee mugs, T-shirt and canvas tote bags splashed with the double-thumbed hand clutching a peyote button with a dagger through the word 'Gonzo.'

Still, this all raises a question: could a fashion-lit trend catch on? We can only hope for Tom Wolfe spats or a Norman Mailer line of Dockers.

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