In 1972, Nike began with a holy trinity. Phil Knight was the fearless entrepreneur who foresaw the rise of running culture. Bill Bowerman, Knight’s former college track coach, was the tireless tinkerer who sliced open his running shoes to make adjustments and commandeered his wife’s waffle iron to develop new rubber soles. And Steve Prefontaine was the otherworldly athlete whose gutsy style and cult of personality lent the Nikes on his feet a sheen of credibility and transcendent cool.
For 50 years, Nike has hewed pretty closely to that basic formula—weaving together bleeding-edge innovation and galactic superstars, and then backing them with savvy industrialism—as it mushroomed into a global powerhouse. The superstars, for the first three decades or so, were almost entirely athletes we all knew on a first-name basis: Michael, Bo, Tiger, Serena. But since the early aughts, the Swoosh has courted a vastly wider array of talent, working with generational hitmakers like Kanye West and Drake, cult art heroes like Tom Sachs and Futura, and fashion world luminaries like Virgil Abloh, Jun Takahashi, and Rei Kawakubo.
“Outside collaborations push us toward the edges as a company,” says Mark Parker, Nike’s executive chairman and former CEO. “Through that exchange, it accelerates our own culture of thinking and innovating.”
The partnerships have produced thousands of products, but these 50 shoes, in particular, tell the epic story of Nike’s culture of collaboration. GQ spoke to dozens of athletes, designers, scientists, and artists to understand the dynamic ideation processes and boundary-pushing technological research that helped transform Nike into a vital creative nexus—and established a model for collaboration that has coursed through the fashion industry at large.
“As the world gets crazier and more complex, the notion of anybody doing anything by themselves is simply going away,” says Tinker Hatfield, the legendary Nike designer. “There needs to be a lot of horsepower behind any new idea. It’s just not possible to win without higher and higher levels of collaboration. Simple as that.”
1970s
Steve Prefontaine liked to look good. “Pre was flashy,” remembers Pat Tyson, his roommate and teammate at the University of Oregon. “He’d drive around in convertible cars wearing a fringed leather coat and flared-out pants. He was the guy.” As the first athlete to sign with Nike, the record-shattering runner funneled all of that swagger into the upstart brand. “He brought showmanship to Nike,” says Tyson. “During that era, most shoes were black-and-white. Steve’s input led to brighter, more shocking colors. He wanted to walk into the room and say, ‘I’ve got a pair of something that no one else has.’” Pre’s untimely passing in 1975 meant he never got to wear these early Nike track spikes at the Montreal Olympics in ‘76, but his fearlessness and flair were forever encoded in the company’s DNA.
1980s
The Air Jordan 1 isn’t merely the most important sneaker in Nike’s history—it’s the most important sneaker, period. It might look relatively simple now, but Michael Jordan’s first shoe single-handedly reversed Nike’s fortunes in the mid-’80s, established a signature line so mammoth it eventually spun off into its own brand, dissolved the division between athletics and fashion forever, and remains one of the most desirable models for collaborators—from Dior’s Kim Jones to Fragment Design’s Hiroshi Fujiwara—to adapt.
“To me, the Air Jordan 1 represents more than just a shoe,” Mark Parker says. “It ignited the concept of letting an athlete’s personality shine through a product. Michael and our designers proved that footwear could be more than functional, it could be an expression of the person.”
Jordan’s persona helped establish a certain tone at Nike. “Whenever I ran into a little resistance in a meeting,” says Tinker Hatfield, who designed over a dozen of the most iconic Air Jordans, “I would take a card out of my pocket, put it on the table, and say, ‘Here's Michael's phone number. If you guys want to talk to him directly about changing his design, go for it.’ Nobody ever called him.”
In 1985, Nike released the now iconic Be True to Your School collection, featuring seven Dunks doused in the colors of UNLV, Kentucky, Syracuse, Michigan, Iowa, Villanova, and St. John’s—plus one entirely different shoe. Georgetown coach John Thompson Jr., fresh off the ‘84 NCAA championship, demanded that his team receive its very own model. Nike appeased him with the Terminator, the first sneaker it ever developed exclusively for a college squad, with “Hoyas” emblazoned across the rear of the team-only court version.
“Pops absolutely loved it, because it was bold,” recalls John Thompson III, the late coach’s son. “People immediately knew that was the Georgetown shoe.”
When the producers of Back to the Future Part II asked Nike to create a sneaker from 26 years in the future, Tinker Hatfield’s imagination instantly came alive. “I thought about how a shoe might have an artificial intelligence that could recognize you and then shape to your foot,” Hatfield says, of the sneaker that automatically ties itself on Michael J. Fox’s feet. “I storyboarded the scene where he puts on the shoes and says, ‘Power laces, all right!”
Of course, to make the technology work in 1989, it required a little bit of movie magic. “There’s a great photo of Michael J. Fox standing on this fake piece of asphalt with all these wires running under it,” says Bob Gale, one of the film’s co-writers. “Our special effects guys lay on the ground, and when he touched the shoes, they pulled the wires and tightened the laces.”
“I was grumpy that day, but when they opened the case, I asked Tinker question after question after question,” Michael J. Fox says. “I was so amazed by the design, the practicality, and just how frickin’ cool they were. They were a mood changer and a game changer."
More than two decades later, the Air Mag changed the game again when Nike released the shoe twice—initially without the power laces in 2011, and then with them in 2016—in support of Fox’s foundation, raising more than $16 million for Parkinson’s research. “It was amazing to see a sci-fi idea become a reality,” Fox says. “What was especially moving was the fact that this technology has real-life applications for people with various impairments, including Parkinson's disease. It was heavy."
1990s
The first time Tinker Hatfield sat down to sketch a shoe for Andre Agassi, he scribbled three huge words, “Anti Country Club,” across the top of the page. “Andre was different,” Hatfield says. “He lived in Vegas, for crying out loud. He was the perfect vehicle for us to turn tennis into a different kind of sport.”
To achieve that, Hatfield infused the Air Tech Challenge II—Agassi’s second signature sneaker—with advanced cushioning and wild neon tones. “It wasn’t just tennis players buying the sneakers anymore,” Hatfield says. “It became part of the street culture. It helped us become a tennis company with an edge.”
Bo Jackson was a two-sport pro athlete, but according to Tinker Hatfield, he didn’t want to play ball when it came to designing his signature Nikes. “I would call Bo, and we'd have a three word conversation,” Hatfield remembers. “And I'm like, ‘God, this is going to be really tough.’” So Hatfield began to “develop an alter-ego for him” in his mind, based on watching him play both baseball and football, their brief phone calls, and the classic cartoon character Mighty Mouse.
“I kept a little character on my desk, and I used him as my muse,” Hatfield says. “Everything got exaggerated and kind of blown out of proportion, like Mighty Mouse—and like Bo. That's how that design process got started.” The resulting shoe, the Air Trainer SC, was a massive hit thanks to its blocky, aggressive lines and the iconic accompanying Bo Knows campaign.
More than 30 years later, Hatfield says, Jackson has finally warmed up to him. “We’ll be in a green room together before speaking on stage, and he is so damn funny,” Hatfield says. “He's like, ‘Tinker Hatfield, come on over here! Remember when we did all that?’ He has a different memory of how we worked together.”
The first time Nike designer Wilson Smith met Charles Barkley, he got a taste of that infamous Barkley snark. “Charles was wearing a pair of walking shoes I had designed,” Smith remembers. “He goes, ‘Man, these are the most uncomfortable shoes I ever had.’ But that’s just Charles Barkley—hilarious.” The Air Max CB34, as a result, was “inspired by his mouth a little bit,” Smith says. “I had this photo of him [smirking], and I based the chunky shapes along the toe on his molars.”
It’s hard to overstate just how historic the Air Swoopes was and remains. Designed for WNBA great Sheryl Swoopes, it was the first basketball shoe crafted specifically for women, the first signature sneaker to bear a female athlete’s name, and was successful enough to spawn a just-as-popular sequel. But it was also just a really good shoe, with an instantly recognizable strap along the mid-foot that allowed for both superior stability and striking color-blocked colorways.
You remember the Lil’ Penny commercials with the Chris Rock-voiced puppet, of course. But the shoes those ads were hawking were plenty special, too. The bold side paneling and bulbous shape made Penny Hardaway’s original signatures one of the most widely beloved hoops shoes of the ‘90s, and it’s still ripe for reinterpretation today—like the recent makeover it received from the North Carolina boutique Social Status.
Baseball cleats rarely cross over into the streets, but Ken Griffey Jr.’s immense popularity led to his muscular signatures getting a spike-free release. The success of the Swingman line—with its Jordan-esque logo of Junior hitting a dinger—landed its namesake his own building on Nike’s Beaverton campus.
2000s
Nike’s first-ever linkup with a clothing label wasn’t quite a true collaboration. Eager to work with the crew at Stüssy U.K., Nike offered the label’s leader at the time, Michael Kopelman, the chance to stock two exclusive colorways of his favorite model at the brand’s London shop. The Stüssy Air Huarache LE became beloved enough by sneakerheads to warrant a rerelease in 2021, and it jump-started the streetwear O.G.’s long and fruitful relationship with the Swoosh.
HTM is the ongoing design partnership between Mark Parker, Tinker Hatfield, and the godfather of Japanese streetwear, Hiroshi Fujiwara. “You could compare our process to a jazz jam session,” Parker says, “like musicians riffing and building on one another’s ideas.” The trio’s first project, in the early aughts, was a take on the Air Woven, a sneaker that had struggled to gain traction at Nike HQ. “HTM came to the rescue,” Hatfield says, by unlocking the aesthetic potential of the shoe’s avant-garde construction—and turning the silhouette into an instant classic in the process.
There’s never been a more perfect pairing of an athlete and sneaker technology than Vince Carter—arguably the greatest dunker of all time—and Shox, Nike’s springlike cushioning system. Carter made headlines in the BB4, the first Shox hoops model, by leaping over French center Frédéric Weis at the 2000 Olympics. But his line reached its apex two years later with the Shox VC 2, which featured the smoothest, swoopiest design of its era. The Shox VC 2 inspired Andy Caine, Nike’s vice president of footwear design, to work at the Swoosh. “That shoe was incredible,” he says. “I probably had 10 pairs but could never work out how it all worked. It was complex and simple all at once.”
To celebrate the Air Max 1’s 15th anniversary, Nike tapped Atmos—then the hottest underground sneaker boutique in Tokyo—for a limited Japan-only release. Atmos creative director Hirofumi Kojima transplanted the print and colorway from the Air Safari—another Tinker Hatfield-designed icon from 1987—onto the Air Max 1. It was instantly sought after by sneakerheads across the globe, and helped kickstart Japan’s reputation as a haven for the rarest, most beautiful Nikes. “It was a good era,” Kojima reflects. “There was more opportunity to work freely. And for collectors, you had to do your research or you might miss a release—there was no iPhone, no Instagram, no Twitter. It was a lot of fun.”
In 2002, Supreme wasn’t yet the world-conquering, Louis Vuitton-collaborating, billion-dollar behemoth it is today. It was just a skate shop on NYC’s Lafayette Street where in-the-know downtown kids milled about. A collaboration with Nike’s fledgling skateboarding division, Nike SB, changed that forever. Supreme’s take on the skateboardified Dunk Low, an homage to the Air Jordan 3’s elephant print, helped give the young label the juice and hype it’s been synonymous with ever since.
Geoff McFetridge grew up wrecking his Nikes. “I've always been a skateboarder, and part of skateboarding is you destroy your shoes,” the Canadian artist says. So, given the chance to design his own kicks, McFetridge wanted to “play with this idea that to enjoy the shoe, you have to wreck it. If you skated in the shoe, it would naturally turn into this second shoe.”
The outer layer of McFetridge’s Vandals are a classic striped oxford cloth, he says, “based on a Brooks Brothers shirt, because I really liked Brooks Brothers at the time.” Hidden just beneath the surface was a layer of printed vinyl covered in McFetridge’s art. “It was silver and garish, and I drew this little character based around the idea of vandalism and my own personal history of vandalizing things as a kid.”
To promote the sneaker, McFetridge devised an art show called The Mind Trip—featuring installations and animations starring the character from the shoe—and toured it around the globe. These days, according to McFetridge, those kinds of marketing feats would be a whole lot harder to pull off. “Somebody told me that there was a meeting at Nike,” he says, “and they explicitly said that my project was an example of ‘This can never happen again.’”
From the moment she signed with Nike in 2003, Serena Williams had one simple goal. “I wanted to make sport and fashion more synonymous,” Williams says. “I wanted to be daring and bold both on and off the court. I’ve always challenged Nike to think bigger and more fashion forward in their designs.”
Designer Wilson Smith answered that call with the tennis great’s first signature shoe, a slick Shox model with a detachable knee-high, boot-like extension that doubled as a compression sleeve to ward off cramping. “She came walking out at the [2004] US Open like she’s on the Paris runway,” Smith says, “and the tournament directors say, ‘Hey, Serena, those boots are a little over the top.’ They’re pretty conservative, [so she was only able to] warm up in them.
“Later that night, I flipped on SportsCenter, and there were the boots. The next day, they’re on the front page of USA Today. All throughout the tournament, most of the images were taken during the warmups, because she didn't wear the boots during the match. That, to me, showed how broad Serena’s reach is. She’s moved [beyond] the game itself.”
Futura wants to make one thing clear about his currency-covered Dunks. “FLOM doesn’t stand for ‘For love of money,’” the street-art luminary says. “It’s ‘For Love Or Money.’ Some people do things for profit, some people do things for love. As an artist, I’m the latter.” With only 24 pairs produced—to commemorate the opening of his store in Fukuoka, Japan—the FLOM remains one of the world’s rarest sneakers, with a single pair selling for a whopping $63,000 at auction in 2020.
To craft the revolutionary Zvezdochka, legendary industrial designer Marc Newson stretched Nike to the outer limits of its manufacturing capabilities. Originally designed for use aboard the International Space Station, the shoe’s modular makeup was meant to provide astronauts with versatility. “You could wear them as booties to float around weightlessly,” Newson says, “and then you pulled on this outer to turn them into fully-functional trainers for the treadmill.” As Nike’s first entirely computer-designed shoe, Newson recalls, “we had to actually write a lot of code and algorithms to do what we did, because the stuff just really didn’t exist.” The Zvezdochka ultimately never made it to space, but its influence is evident everywhere you look in modern sneaker culture, from the molded rubber outer of Adidas’s Yeezy Foam Runner to the modular construction of Nike’s own ISPA Link.
It took a lot of convincing for Nike to let Stephen “ESPO” Powers make the company’s first-ever see-through shoe. “Nike’s in the business of performance,” the street artist says, and his concept of an invisible all-plastic sneaker didn’t quite jell with that. “I steered it back to their comfort zone by saying it was going to be a performance shoe, but it would be performing as art.” Even then, Powers remembers, Nike’s first draft was only partially plastic. “I said, ‘Come on. If Jellies can do it, why can’t Nike?’” Eventually, Powers and Nike landed on a design that balanced large transparent panels with original ESPO artwork, and came with a special pair of socks to boot. As proud of the finished product as he is, Powers admits Nike might have had a point about the performance. “Within two blocks, the plastic was cutting my feet,” he says. “Those shoes went back into the box and I never wore them again.”
Union’s take on the Air Force 180—designed by the influential L.A. boutique’s then manager (and current owner) Chris Gibbs—reads like a time capsule of streetwear’s aughts heyday. “I was fresh off the boat from NYC and heavy into ‘90s basketball silhouettes, so I gravitated towards the 180 because it was a great representative of that era I loved so much,” Gibbs says. “Streetwear was a rebellion against the fashion industry at large, which typically only played in blacks and navies, so I wanted the colors to be in contrast to that. I took the camo from my favorite jacket and changed the colors around to be more playful. It was probably inspired by Bape, who was doing a lot of that at the time.”
When Nike SB tapped Jeff Staple to design a New York-inspired Dunk, he cycled through all the obvious references. “We thought about a Statue of Liberty Dunk,” Staple says. “A subway Dunk. A taxi Dunk. In the end, we decided that the pigeon was the unofficial mascot of New York City. Not everyone would get it, but the people who lived and breathed here would.” Not only did they get it—they wanted it ravenously. The release of Staple’s Dunks, doused in feathery gray suedes with an embroidered pigeon along the heel, caused a riot outside of his Reed Space boutique in the Lower East Side. For much of mainstream America, the shoe served as their introduction to the rising hysteria of sneaker culture. “SNEAKER FRENZY,” the front page of the New York Post famously read the next morning. “HOT SHOE SPARKS RUCKUS.”
Paul Rodriguez Jr. grew up obsessed with Nike, but when the Swoosh first approached the rising skateboarder about a potential sponsorship, he balked. “At first, Nike wasn’t planning on making signature shoes for skate, and that was a dealbreaker for me,” Rodriguez says. Eventually, the brand changed its tune and granted P-Rod the first SB pro model—a retro-inflected low-top with a quilted leather heel and full Zoom Air cushioning. “I’m just happy that my teenage self stood his ground and stuck to his dream.”
Graffiti legend Stash was one of Nike’s first and most important non-athlete collaborators, paving the way for colleagues like Futura to get involved with the Swoosh soon after. He introduced his trademark tonal blue palette on an Air Classic BW in 2003, but the colorway hit its high-water mark three years later when Stash applied it as a gradient to the cascading stripes on the Air Max 95. The 95 is one of his favorites, Stash says, “because look how fucking crack it came out. One of the best shoes ever made to this day. You don't have to touch it. That's one of those ‘If it ain't broke, don't fix it’ models.”
Hong Kong streetwear stalwart CLOT’s mission is to bridge the East and West through thoughtfully designed goods. And its Kiss of Death Air Max 1—the first in a long lineage of Nike collaborations—succeeds at that swimmingly. Inspired by traditional Chinese medicine, the clear toe box (as in you can see the tops of your toes while wearing them) reveals an acupuncture chart on the insole, while the outsole is printed with a diagram outlining the pressure points of the foot.
Few Nike collaborators earned their own shoe more than did Bobbito Garcia, the New York street-ball folk hero, DJ, documentarian, author, and O.G. steward of sneakerhead culture. His Air Force 1 is blessed with a gorgeous mix of suede, leather, and mesh alongside nods to Garcia’s passions for vinyl records and basketball.
Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis’s Dunk High Pro is the epitome of a simple idea executed flawlessly. “I wanted it to look like Ace Frehley’s silver platform space boots from Kiss,” he says. Mission accomplished. Doused in gleaming metallic silver with bright violet accents and the band’s logo and mascot stamped on the sides, the shoe was an instant grail that earned Mascis fans well beyond his regular listeners. “People will come up and talk to me about the sneakers and have no idea I’m in a band,” he says.
“You don’t ever truly know when it’s ready until you do the lab test yourself,” LeBron James says of his signature sneakers. Which makes sense when you consider all that’s required of them to keep up with the greatest player of his generation. “What’s tough with LeBron is that he’s superhuman,” says Nike’s Tony Bignell. “He's so powerful that everything is stiffer, tighter, harder, firmer. How do you make something work great for him—and work for the kids who are playing in the shoes too?”
With 2009’s LeBron VII, Nike unlocked something special. Featuring ultralight Flywire construction and full-length Air Max cushioning, the shoe performed like an absolute dream, and was also one of the first LeBron signatures sleek enough to wear off the hardwood. “The LeBron VII set the mark,” James says. “It was a great time in my career and an unbelievable shoe. We hit that one outta the park.”
“Kobe Bryant was maniacal about performance,” says Jonathan Johnsongriffin, Nike’s vice president of global creative. “He always wanted an edge, and we learned so much from him pushing us to get that edge. We would end up with solutions we never even dreamed we’d get to.” To satiate the Lakers legend’s demand for increased quickness, Nike cooked up a revolutionary low-top silhouette for the Kobe IV. “The conventional wisdom was that a high-top gave you the support you needed,” Johnsongriffin says. “Kobe was always challenging that.” The pared-down cut became a staple of the Kobe line going forward, and his shoes still rank among the most-worn kicks in the NBA today.
2010s
Since 2010, Undercover founder Jun Takahashi has helmed Gyakusou, a technical running imprint that’s become one of Nike’s longest-running collaborations. Japanese for “reverse running”—a nod to Takahashi’s morning ritual of running through Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park counterclockwise—Gyakusou blends the designer’s moody, experimental impulses with Nike’s performance expertise. “Jun has an insight with color that we would never have come up with,” says Nike global marketing director Fraser Cooke, who sold Takahashi on the project. “We wanted to intersect with a younger running community that is more design-led—not just the pure running community that Nike is built upon as a company.”
Designed by the Dutch artist Piet Parra, this luxed-up Air Max 1 was released to celebrate the Amsterdam sneaker shop Patta’s fifth anniversary. It’s a testament to the power of simple colors and great materials: The deep red suede uppers, chenille details, and contrasting hits of baby blue combine for one of the most richly alluring and supremely wearable sneakers of all time.
While designing the Air Yeezy 2, former Nike designer Nathan VanHook got a taste of Kanye West’s full capacity for creativity. “We went to Paris for a two-day trip in the middle of the Watch The Throne sessions,” VanHook recalls. “Kanye, Virgil [Abloh], and I worked through all the colorways while they’re making an album and a documentary. Being able to take time away from creating one of the most iconic albums of the decade to create his shoe? It was surreal.”
That shoe, of course, wound up being just as iconic as the album—thanks in no small part to Kanye’s exacting attention to detail. “We don’t want something mall,” Kanye once told VanHook as they examined potential materials. “It couldn’t be basic, it couldn’t be cheap,” VanHook says. “We sweated every single little part of this shoe. We wanted to make it so if that thing goes in the MoMA one day, every single thing is thought out.” That meant sculpting the shoe to fit Kanye’s feet precisely, developing new techniques to give the techy outer a natural-looking anaconda reptile finish, and relentlessly reworking the obelisk-shaped lace tips to prevent them from falling off.
Altogether, it added up to one of the most highly covetable—and highly valuable—sneakers of all time. “I had one pair of the Red October [colorway],” VanHook says, “and my younger cousin paid for his first year of college with them.”
Tom Sachs is bothered by his Nike sneaker’s hype. “I'm a 19th-century artisanal sculptor in my atelier in Soho, making things the way they did a hundred years ago, and they're expensive and it's elitist,” the artist says. “When I first got involved with Nike, the motivation was to make a sculpture for everyone. So when it became so coveted, it was really annoying.”
It’s not all that hard to understand why Sachs’s shoes are so in demand, though. Despite its unassuming silhouette, the original Mars Yard is packed with rare technologies intended for serious use—including the same fabric used in “the airbags that bounced rovers down to the surface of Mars,” Sachs says. “I gave a pair to a friend who [later] asked, ‘Oh, do I get the new ones too?’ And I said, ‘No, because the Mars Yards are still in the box on your mantle, so you didn't pass the test.’ Another friend of mine wore them to death, put a new sole on ‘em, patched ‘em—and that friend gets a lifetime supply.”
Kevin Durant’s sixth signature employed a soccer boot-like, low-slung cut and asymmetrical lacing for an extra-close fit and improved lateral quickness. Those unusual details made the KD 6 one of the most distinctive and instantly recognizable basketball shoes of its era, and the easily printable synthetic upper lent itself well to a slew of memorable colorways, from the rose-covered Aunt Pearl makeup to the paint-splattered Texas version (a nod to his alma mater, UT).
“How can I work on something that is so iconic?” Riccardo Tisci asked Fraser Cooke when the then Givenchy designer prepared to put his spin on the Air Force 1. “He described it as the Hermès Kelly bag of footwear,” Cooke recalls. “He was scared to destroy this thing he had so much reverence for.” Despite those fears, Tisci still took a radical approach to the shoe—adding a boot-inspired leather collar that extended all the way up to the knee.
When Nike approached Acronym designer Errolson Hugh about collaborating on the Lunar Force 1, he had only one question. “I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it, but you know we don’t just want to change the color, right?’”
A few weeks later, a crate of shoes arrived at Acronym’s Berlin workshop. “We got out the scissors and the masking tape, and just went to town,” Hugh remembers. They sliced the shoe open straight down one side and added a stark black zipper. “We wanted to treat what we did to the shoe as an intervention,” he says.
That approach made the Lunar Force 1 one of the most divisive sneakers of the era. “People would stop my friends and say, ‘Yo, did you do that yourself? Why did you destroy your Nikes?’ Or like, ‘Where did you get those?’ You could really tell the type of philosophical outlook somebody had by how they reacted to that shoe.
Virgil Abloh worked fast. The Ten, his visionary debut footwear collection with Nike—a literal deconstruction of 10 classic Swoosh shoes—was produced in record time. “Normally it takes about 18-24 months to develop one model,” says Shamees Aden, a Nike designer who worked on the project. “The Ten was created in about 10 months, Nike’s fastest-ever development process.”
During that period, Abloh was in continuous contact with the Nike team via his preferred method of communication: WhatsApp. “We weren’t just having conversations,” Aden says. He would sketch onto images the team sent him, draw notes on photos of samples to indicate changes, and share ideas and research and references. And on the rare occasions Abloh was able to drop by Nike HQ, he made the most of his time. The first five models of The Ten, including this standout take on the Air Presto, came together after just five hours in a workroom. “It was an incredibly hands-on session,” Aden says. “We certainly knew that we were on the right track, but I still couldn’t have fathomed the impact that these sneakers would have on the world. They’re works of art.”
In 2017, Nike tasked a dozen global creatives to design their own Air Max model and let fans vote on which shoe they wanted to see produced. Sean Wotherspoon, cofounder of the vintage store Round Two, was perhaps the least recognizable name in the contest—but that gave him a chip on his shoulder that propelled him to victory. “I read the rules,” Wotherspoon says, “because the embarrassment of getting disqualified would’ve been so crazy. And one of the big points was involving your community in the design process.”
So Wotherspoon rounded up his friends—including A$AP Nast and the jeweler Ben Baller—and gathered them together to design his shoe. The result was a mix of the Air Max 1’s sole with the Air Max 97’s curvaceous upper, all decked out in pastel corduroys. Not only did Wotherspoon’s sneaker win the contest, it instantly became one of the hottest shoes of the year and turned Wotherspoon into one of the industry’s most sought-after designers. “It literally changed my life,” he says. “It changed everything about what my trajectory was.”
To help launch the Zoom Kobe 1 Protro—a remastered version of Kobe’s 2006 kicks for the modern game—Nike asked the L.A. sneaker outpost Undefeated, one of the Swoosh’s longest-running collaborators, to put its spin on the silhouette. The shop decked the shoe out in several different shades of camouflage, including a gold-and-purple version worn by LeBron on his first appearance as a Laker. “It speaks to Kobe’s mentality,” says Fred Lozano, Undefeated’s chief operating officer. “When you’re on court, you’re at war.”
The Air Monarch IVs are your dad’s Nikes: clunky, sterile, and severely uncool. In the hands of the superstar London designer Martine Rose, however, they got transformed into a beacon of postmodernist funk. “[Rose] was looking at how athletes’ feet, because of the impact during games, can get morphed out of shape,” Nike’s Andy Caine says. To mimic that phenomenon, Rose amplified the Monarch’s ungainly proportions into something more amorphous and sculptural—and then coated it all in Pepto Bismol pink.
It’s not often that an outside collaborator brings a working prototype to their first Nike meeting, but that’s precisely what Cactus Plant Flea Market designer Cynthia Lu did with her take on the Air VaporMax 2019. “It was one of those moments,” Andy Caine says, “where you walk in and see that for the first time and just go, Wow. I wasn’t mentally prepared for that.” Lu’s handmade mock-up—with its tubular swoosh and bubble lettering—wound up going to production with almost no edits. “Cynthia brought almost the opposite of what had been successful in VaporMax”—imposing her whimsical aesthetic on a sleek silhouette—“and it connected in such a humanistic way. That’s why collaborations are so powerful, because they bring that different mindset. That’s the magic of it.”
When she first met with Nike, Yoon Ahn sheepishly admitted she wasn’t much of an athlete. “I had this impression that you had to play sports to collaborate with Nike,” says Ahn, the Ambush founder and Dior Men jewelry designer. “They said, ‘That’s okay, that’s not why we want to work with you.’” What Nike wanted was Ahn’s offbeat perspective and Y2K-tinged aesthetic, which she wove seamlessly into her first shoe—a hybrid of the Air Max 180 and Gary Payton’s Air Zoom Flight The Glove.
You know how sometimes you have to lug an extra pair of indoor shoes around all day because you’re hitting the gym after work? Matthew M. Williams, the Alyx founder and Givenchy creative director, had a solution. For his first Nike sneaker, Williams employed the outsole savants at Vibram to create a detachable rubber crampon for roaming around the streets. Un-Velcro it and you’ll find a futuristic high-performance trainer featuring tracklike speed laces and sci-fi molded overlays.
Sacai founder Chitose Abe made her name on mash-ups—military flight jackets fused with cotton button-downs; chinos spliced together with nylon track pants. So it made sense that the Japanese designer would bring her Frankensteined approach to her Nike sneakers. The double-swooshed LDV Waffle is an elevated, forward-thinking blend of the old-school Long Distance Vector and Waffle Racer models. “You can tell that they’re based on Nike,” Abe says, “but the silhouette and design work show Sacai’s ideas and identity.”
2020s
“I had a friend over at Nike SB, and he dropped me a text: ‘What do you think about a collab?’” says Jay Curley, Ben & Jerry’s global head of integrated marketing. “I'd love to say it was a much deeper thought than that, but I really don't think it was.” Just like that, the wackiest sneaker of 2020 was born. Affectionately dubbed the Chunky Dunky, the low-top SB Dunk came smothered in Ben & Jerry’s iconography: hairy cow print, stitched-on clouds, and a whole lot of tie-dye for good measure. Despite its goofiness, the shoe was a surprise smash, reselling for thousands of dollars online and showing up on the feet of unlikely fans like Quavo and Killer Mike. What do the eponymous ice cream moguls think of the kicks? “Ben and Jerry each got a pair,” Curley says. “I’ve never seen them wearing them, but I think they thought it was cool.”
When Eliud Kipchoge ran the world’s first sub-two-hour marathon in October 2019, it was hailed as a remarkable feat of individual speed. But getting to that moment required hundreds of scientists, designers, and engineers at Nike working closely with him for years to develop a prototype for a revolutionary new running shoe. “We needed a faster shoe,” Kipchoge says. “But above all, we needed faster recovery. A shoe where you could run for three hours and then have your muscles recover very fast.”
To perfect the Alphafly’s propulsive carbon plate and foam cushioning, Kipchoge sent daily data and biweekly notes from his training camp in Kenya to Nike HQ for months. “Eliud sets really high standards, and he has big, audacious dreams, and he just keeps ticking away at them,” says Nike’s Tony Bignell, who led the shoe’s development process. “And that carries through across the whole team.” In order to build his trust in the final version of the shoe, Kipchoge clocked more than 800 km in a single pair in the lead-up to race day. “The shoe was still functioning,” Kipchoge says. “It was ready to go.”
Travis Scott has been responsible for a grip of Nike’s most hotly desired sneakers of the past few years, from his mossy take on the Air Jordan 1 to a desert-toned flip on the Air Max 270. But the rapper’s single rarest Nike shoe is this three-way collaboration with Playstation. Featuring Scott’s signature backwards swoosh and the gaming system’s logo, only a handful were made and then raffled off to coincide with the release of the PS5. If you’re looking to get your hands on ‘em now, you’d better have deep pockets: At press time, the most affordable pair on StockX was listed for a cool $65,000.
The Air Foamposite One’s freaky molded upper has been subject to a wild bunch of interpretations over the years. It’s been chromed out with a mirrorlike shine, blanketed in a starry space scene, and dressed up in a regal rococo print by Supreme. But until Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo got her hands on it, no one had ever messed with the very structure of the shoe itself. CdG’s Foamposites replace the familiar wavy molding with a fingerprint-esque series of concentric circles, resulting in perhaps the single trippiest take on an all-time trippy sneaker.
“Drake wanted to do something new,” says Matte Babel, chief brand officer at Drake’s DreamCrew management company. “When big athletes sign with Nike, they create a new shoe for them. But when entertainers sign, they normally just put a new colorway on an older model. Drake said, ‘I don’t want to just take an existing shoe, give it some minor adjustments, and say it’s my shoe.’” The 6 God got his wish: As part of his NOCTA line with Nike, Drake debuted the Hot Step Air Terra, a ‘90s-inspired runner with an ultra-clean padded upper. Why the name? “I asked Drake what he wanted to call the shoe, and without hesitation he said, ‘The Hot Step.’” Babel says. “It cuts to the point and doesn’t feel like a Nike shoe name.”
Growing up in the South of France, where “walking and hiking are a way of life,” designer Simon Porte Jacquemus became obsessed with Nike’s outdoorsy All Conditions Gear sub-label. So when it came time to work on his own Nike sneaker, he didn’t hesitate to select the Air Humara, a classic ‘90s-era ACG hiker. “The Humara has always been my favorite Nike shoe,” Jacquemus says. “It has this very technical design and hiking details that I love. I wanted to celebrate the utilitarian function of it, while elevating the colors so it could fit naturally into other settings, like the city.” To that end, he luxed up the uppers in earthy suedes and leathers, with a miniature gold swoosh that “reflects the attention to detail and sensuality of Jacquemus.”
Yang-Yi Goh is GQ’s style editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of GQ with the title “50 Years of Energy”
Additional Credits:
Nike SB x Futura “FLOM” Dunk High: courtesy of Sotheby’s. Nike x Patta Air Max 1 “Cherrywood”: courtesy of Parra. All other photographs: courtesy of Nike.
