Blame the yellow sticky. It took a small paper note to instigate the
most hardwearing Nike shoe to date. Delivered from the very top, it was
less a request and more of an instruction — make a shoe for outdoor
basketball.
That meant now.
With Tinker Hatfield sketching and fellow designer Mark Smith
deployed to New York the following day to capture the look and mood of
the city’s concrete battlegrounds, it became clear that this was a
completely different game. This was where big league heroes could be
humbled by local legends.
Rather than resorting to extra bulk, the Nike Air Raid was a shoe
that needed to be built from the ground up. The sole stayed flat to
ensure total contact with the ground and the quest to strike a balance
between resilience and light weight resulted in an expressive and
interactive design that worked with an outdoor environment. The
heavy-duty lateral bumper was added out of necessity, padding was
studied meticulously and Tinker’s cross strap design delivered total
lockdown through experience. “I was looking at how athletes tape their ankles.”
That ‘X’ arrived at a moment when knowledge of self and roughneck
aesthetics united. Through sheer coincidence, movements converged and a
bubbling culture spilled into the Nike Air Raid’s DNA almost
unconsciously. Supported by an equally confrontational ad campaign that
helped imprint an ‘X’ on an entire generation’s psyche, caged courts got
the shoes it deserved. Twenty years later, it’s still one of Tinker’s
favorite projects. “We felt that in a short space of time, we’d caught the essence of the shoe itself — a rougher game without officials and referees.”
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