1997 Nike Air Foamposite One

by Drew Hammell

It looked like a shoe from space, or an alien vessel constructed from an otherworldly material that landed on the hardwood, something that might leave a crater behind. The Foamposite was wild—so wild it got kids jumping off their couches and squinting at their pre-HD TV sets extra hard to see what Mike Bibby had on his feet. What are those weird-looking blue shoes? Nikes? Is Bibby wearing another brand? Where’s the Swoosh?

The Foamposite One first appeared on the feet of Bibby and several other Arizona Wildcats players during the 1997 NCAA Tournament. During the 1996–97 college basketball season, Nike invited the Arizona Wildcats up to its World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, to try out footwear that hadn’t released to the public yet. The players were basically guinea pigs for Nike, as they were routinely sent prototypes to test out. Hence everyone’s eyes locking onto that strange blue shoe Bibby donned during the ’97 tournament.

Arizona was not favored to make it to the Final Four that year, so the Foamposites could have disappeared as early as the Sweet Sixteen, when the Wildcats faced Kansas. But Arizona kept winning, and those Foamposites kept showing up on the big stage—including the championship game against Kentucky, which Arizona won. All of a sudden, everyone was well aware of, albeit still somewhat confused by, those strange blue shoes.

By ’97, every college team had adopted Michigan’s Fab 5 mentality—baggy shorts and flashy sneakers were all the rage. But Arizona took things a step further, wearing the newest Nikes—some that hadn’t even released yet. Bibby wasn’t alone in wearing Foamposites against Kentucky. Several other players also donned them for that game. In fact, some of the team members had the Foams on their feet as far back as the Sweet Sixteen game against Kansas. A total of three Arizona Wildcats wore the never-before-seen sneaker during that game versus the Jayhawks: Bibby, forward Donnell Harris, and redshirt freshman Quynn Tebbs.

A few days after Arizona won, the main spokesman of the Foamposite One wore them on the NBA hardwood. Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway, the 6'7" point guard for the Orlando Magic, sported the Foamposites starting in April 1997. He would rock a white/black pair, an all-black pair, and, of course, the royal blue colorway, which went perfectly with the Orlando jerseys. After Shaquille O’Neal left Orlando in 1996, Hardaway was the main man for the Magic during the 1996–97 season. Though he battled through injuries that year, he was still named a starter for the NBA All-Star game for the third-straight time. And even though Michael Jordan was back in the league, Hardaway was still a marketing force for Nike and the NBA.

Nike, as always, enjoyed pushing the limits of what was deemed acceptable on the basketball court, and the Foamposite caught the eye of league officials, an echo of Jordan wearing his black and red Nike Air Ship that the league infamously banned thirteen years earlier. After Hardaway wore the Foamposites on court, the NBA ruled that Hardaway’s all-blue kicks had to be at least 50 percent black to match Orlando’s jerseys. So the Magic’s equipment manager cleverly filled in the ridges of the upper with a Sharpie marker so that Hardaway could keep wearing them. The Magic fell to the Heat in the first round of the playoffs that year, so Hardaway wouldn’t have another opportunity to wear them that season.

Incredibly, Nike wasn’t originally planning on using Hardaway as the main ambassador for the Foamposite line. As the story goes, Nike met with Hardaway to show him samples of his newest model. He wasn’t satisfied with any of them, until he saw a bag with the Foamposite One prototype inside. He immediately fell in love with the model, and so Nike proceeded to turn it into Penny’s own—even sacrificing the Swoosh for a more prominent One Cent logo. According to sources, he was not happy when Arizona players got to wear them publicly on the court before him. After all, the sneaker was meant for him, not some college team.

Part of what made the Foamposite One appealing was its lack of Nike branding. With just a tiny white Swoosh on the lateral forefoot side, it was hard to tell that it was even a Nike sneaker. What stood out more than the Swoosh was Hardaway’s logo on the tongue, heel, and outsole. First seen on Hardaway’s Air Penny 1 and Air Penny 2 models, the logo strangely appeared on the Foamposite One, as well. This certainly wasn’t the first time Nike limited its Swoosh presence on the exterior of a shoe—the Huarache line had moved units with minimal branding five years earlier.

Designed by Eric Avar and Jeff Johnson, the beetle-like Foamposite One was packed with new technology. Labeled “the shoe of the future,” it featured a full-length low-to-the-ground Zoom Air unit. The incredibly light polyurethane upper and midsole surrounded the foot for protection and comfort. A carbon fiber plate provided stability and flexibility in the midsole. Nike partnered with Daewoo (the car company) to provide the proper synthetic materials. A synthetic liquid was poured into a $750,000 mold, which fused the upper, midsole, and outsole into one piece.

“It was basically just an envelope of material that we were pouring polyurethane into. And that was creating the form and the structure,” Avar said in a post published on Nike.com. “The center core of the mold was a last, and then the outer walls of the mold was all this outer detail, and then you pressed everything together.”

Nike has shared several prototypes over the years, including an all-white model similar to what Hardaway wore, as well as a Foamposite upper with a heel Air Max unit.

The brand ultimately released the Foamposite with Zoom Air cushioning and that translucent outsole. Bibby reportedly complained he was sliding all over the court when he wore them during March Madness.

For all this technology, the Foamposite One didn’t come cheap; it retailed for a staggering $180—more than Air Jordans at the time. A new generation of sneakers had arrived. Nike successfully raised the bar for technology, fashion, and price point with the popularity of the model.

Nike promoted the Foamposite through a series of print ads. Right around the time Bibby and Hardaway revealed the Foams on TV, the brand produced a mysterious postcard featuring the Foamposite One on a wet basketball court. There was also a “phone ad” of the Foamposite—part of the two-year series from 1995 to 1997 of more than sixty different Nike sneakers that were featured on a simple white background with a red Swoosh logo and telephone number on the bottom.

As far as TV commercials for the Foamposite went, there were no ads featuring Hardaway or his sidekick, Lil’ Penny. Instead, there were just two short clips of the Foamposite—one with the sneaker sitting on a subway seat and another with the shoe on a basketball court. There were anonymous voices in the background talking about Hardaway and his new “space basketball shoes.” Considering the relative lack of marketing Nike put into the bold new design makes the fact that it was a phenomenon even more impressive.

In the fall of ’97, a new Foamposite released: the Foamposite Pro. The Pro featured a jeweled Swoosh on the side and no Hardaway logo. It was originally designed for Chicago Bull Scottie Pippen, but he was not a fan of the model and never wore it in an NBA game. San Antonio Spurs star forward Tim Duncan famously wore it during the ’98 All-Star Game that season.

Since Nike never planned on retroing the Foamposite, the original molds were destroyed. The next generation of Foams looked slightly different. That didn’t deter sneakerheads from buying them, though. The Foamposite Pro retroed for the first time in 2001, and seven colorways would release over the next five years. The Foamposite One returned for the first time in four colorways in 2007.

Since 1997, Nike has released almost a hundred different colorways of the Foamposite, and countless other models have been inspired by the original design.

Nike turned up Foamposite frenzy to a fever pitch with the much-hyped Galaxy, from 2012. With a glow-in-the-dark outsole and printed upper (a first on a Foamposite), it inspired sneakerheads to camp out for days. It also drew police presence at its launch in Orlando at that year’s NBA All-Star festivities. Thanks in part to platforms like Twitter and Instagram, where the pandemonium surrounding the model played out in real time, and the growing sneaker resale market, the Galaxy helped set off the current sneaker craze.

But the Galaxy isn’t the only Foam to have met such a fervored response. Its success was followed by a sustained campaign of graphic pairs that were nearly unattainable. The ParaNorman and Doerbecher models, from 2012 and 2013, still remain highly sought after. And in 2014, the NYPD shut down the New York City in-store launch of Supreme’s Foamposite. Videos from the event showed Lafayette Street closed as mobs of people flooded SoHo, hoping to walk away with the sneaker. Supreme stopped selling its Nike projects in store for years as a result. The Foamposite is beloved for its outrageous design, its once-futuristic tech, and the lore behind its introduction. As the years went by and sneakers grew lighter and more breathable, the Foamposite became increasingly known as a bulky, heavy “brick” of a shoe. Very few professional players break out the Foams on the court anymore, but the line continues to retro in new and OG colorways both in the Foamposite One and Pro models. When it first dropped, nobody on this planet had ever seen a shoe like the Foam. Footwear here on Earth hasn’t been the same since.

Honorable Mention
Nike Air Max 97

by Brendan Dunne

It’s a flashing symbol of status on the street outside a Milan nightclub. It’s a bullet train speeding through the countryside in sleek silver. It’s a drop of water in a pond, the ripples drawing concentric circles. All of these storylines of varying veracity contribute to the mythology of the Nike Air Max 97, a model that went from cult favorite to mainstream smash over the long tail of its retro life.

The Air Max 97 debuted in the fall of 1997, an era when Nike could still reasonably bill its Air-bubbled shoes as legitimate runners. Track stars Michael Johnson and Carl Lewis endorsed it. The 97 had legitimate innovations, too, like that striking full-length bag on the bottom. Its metallic and reflective sheen (inspired, despite popular lore, by mountain bike finishes rather than Japanese bullet trains) cast it as a cutting-edge machine for athletes. But it was the shoe’s impact outside the world of sports performance that made it legendary.

“It became the shoe for kids,” Italian fashion designer Riccardo Tisci recalled in Le Silver, a 2017 monograph on how much Italy cherished the model. “You’d go to a rave and you’d see it on the feet of everybody.”

Tisci traced the shoe’s influence in Italy back to dangerous nightlife figures who picked up on its futuristic look early. In the year after its debut, the Air Max 97 moved from that world to runways, appearing in shows for Giorgio Armani and Dolce &Gabbana, back when sneakers were non-existent in fashion houses. Per Le Silver, one Foot Locker manager in Milan hoarded the 97s, refusing to put them on sale despite company orders and later feeling vindicated when people flocked to his store to pick up pairs as they gained momentum.

That energy around the Nike Air Max 97 didn’t resonate globally until the shoe was resurrected for its twentieth anniversary. In the interim decades, it was very much a sneakerhead shoe—Nike wasn’t making a significant amount of pairs, and a stroll through the fashionable sectors of any given city wouldn’t necessarily yield many sightings. But a shrewd Nike marketing plan that saw pairs trickle out starting in late 2016 and went full force in 2017 turned the sneaker from cult classic to ubiquitous.

Christian Tresser, who designed the shoe, intended the wavy lines of the upper to represent a drop’s reverberations in a pond. Look from the top down and you’ll see the translation, the circles that start smaller and widen with the passing of time.

The design turned out to be prophetic; more than twenty years later, the imprint of the Air Max 97 is only getting bigger.