2000 Nike Air Presto

by Gerald Flores

It’s a shoe that would have been called the Air Comfy if a slipper brand in New England hadn’t already owned the rights to the name. “What is it going to take to get that mark?” future Nike CEO Mark Parker asked the sneaker’s designer, Tobie Hatfield, in the late ’90s, when he found out the company’s legal department was nixing the original name of the model.

“We’d have to talk to the company,” Hatfield replied. “Well, how big is the company?” Parker said, determined to secure the moniker for this upcoming shoe. “Maybe we entertain buying the company so we can get that name.”

Fortunately for sneaker enthusiasts, and for that unnamed New England company, Nike chose to go with Air Presto. Although it’s not as self-explanatory as Air Comfy, comfy was the word the first testers of the prototype used to describe the sensation of wearing the shoe, which is what inspired the original name in the first place.

“Ninety percent of the time, that’s the word that came out of their mouth when they tried it on,” Hatfield recalled. He knew it was a hit when they showed it off at a Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon expo and sold out of all 120 promotional pairs. Six people even took the shoes and ran the marathon in them the next day.

Hatfield came up with the concept for the shoe while opening Nike’s first research-and-development facility in Taiwan. Unlike most of Nike’s products, there was no product brief or athlete asking for it. Hatfield simply came up with the idea after walking by a yet-to-be-used sample room full of fresh materials and components. He wanted to be the first to play with what was in there. “The room was just for innovation and for starting new things,” Hatfield said. “Nothing was going in it. And I had this, like, real, I guess you could say, an epiphany.”

He was wearing one of the company’s Air Max sneakers at the time. While he liked the model, he and others to whom he spoke were concerned about fit and comfort. After taking stock of the materials in the room, he cobbled together a shoe that would address those issues, using an existing model as a base and stripping it down to its essentials.

“Nobody was necessarily telling me what to do,” Hatfield said. “I decided to go ahead and just do something on my own.”

The result was a running sneaker with a stretchy sock-like upper. He decided to put it to the test by giving it to somebody who was going for a run. It just so happened that the runner was a size 11, two full sizes bigger than the size 9 sample.

Hatfield didn’t tell him the shoe was two sizes too small, though he expected to hear it was too tight. The feedback he received an hour later mystified him. The runner didn’t mention the size discrepancy, instead reporting a mostly smooth ride.

“Why was he not able to detect that it was too small? The only thing I could think of is that, when we build a shoe normally, you have areas all along the shoe that [have] tension in [them],” Hatfield said, referring to the parts of the sneaker he stripped from the prototype. “When you do this, essentially, you’re elongating the shoe, and so it essentially grew with his foot because that tension wasn’t there to hold it up.”

Presto. Hatfield inadvertently created sneaker magic. He knew he had to develop this concept further and put it in front of Parker.

As he built on the idea, Hatfield actually looked to one of his brother Tinker’s designs from the ’90s for inspiration: the Air Huarache. The form-fitting silhouette on that running sneaker used a scuba-like material called neoprene. There was only one problem with it.

“The one thing that people didn’t necessarily like about it was that it was too hot,” Hatfield said. “We did poke some holes in [it] and tried to ventilate it as much as possible. But it still was pretty toasty.”

So the designer looked to the medical industry. There, he found a vendor that provided a mesh material that was replacing neoprene in hospitals. The material came in a variety of thicknesses and could stabilize, for instance, wraps for tennis elbow but still allow a little bit of movement. The Presto marked the first time the material was used in a shoe.

The next part of the puzzle was figuring out its sizing. How could Nike put true sizes on something that could fit a range of feet?

“Every foot is very different, morphologically, and then, on top of that, everybody’s perception is different. Some like it tight; some like it loose. It’s all over the board,” Hatfield said. “Then [I] took a step back and thought when I buy a shirt or whatever, the fact is that it’s labeled a small, medium, large. I already know what’s going on, that it’s a range.”

The Nike Presto came in a T-shirt-like assortment of sizes, hence the tagline “T-Shirts for Your Feet.” The designer even envisioned the sneakers hanging on vertical racks in stores next to packs of socks instead of in traditional shoeboxes.

When the Presto rolled out—in boxes—it released in an astonishing thirteen colorways, an anomaly for a totally new product, which would normally be available in three to four, at most. Twelve of the thirteen colorways also had their own cartoon characters that were featured in a series of TV spots—a marketing effort devised by agency Wieden+Kennedy. The sneaker was an instant success.

“The buys were starting to be very, very strong,” Hatfield said. “We’d hear from the Foot Lockers and the big-box stores how much they wanted to buy into this because it was different. It wasn’t like anything else on their wall.”

The shoes, released close to the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, were an immediate success. In addition to athletes, special editions of the sneakers also made their way to pop culture icons. In 2001, Nike gave Eric Clapton an exclusive run of Prestos while he was on his world tour. A special checkerboard-print version of the sneaker was specifically made for Rick Nielsen of the band Cheap Trick. An extremely limited Hello Kitty collaboration was made in 2004 to mark the character’s thirtieth anniversary. Friends-and-family pairs were even produced for the cast and crew of the Sex and the City movie in 2008.

Unlike the Air Jordan or other sneakers in Nike’s lineage, the Presto was seldom retroed. It has, however, seen a few iterations over the years, including a slip-on version of the silhouette without the plastic cage, the Air Presto Chanjo. In the early 2000s, the sneaker was reconfigured by Mark Parker, Tinker Hatfield, and Hiroshi Fujiwara’s design team, known as HTM, to function more like a boot, with only about 1,500 pairs made. A reinforced version of the shoe, which could be used as a cross-trainer, also released at mass retail.

Collaborations helped bring the Presto back to the fore in the ’10s. German brand Acronym, led by designer Errolson Hugh, who was also working on the Nike ACG line at the time, retooled the Presto to be a zip-up mid-cut sneaker with updated fabrics in the fall of 2016. The silhouette was also included in Virgil Abloh’s “The Ten,” a collection of deconstructed sneakers by the designer meant to represent the ten models that changed Nike’s trajectory.

The Presto helped pave the way for other products inside the brand, too. If it weren’t for the model, Hatfield wouldn’t have gone on to create the Nike Free line, the cornerstone of Nike’s natural-motion footwear. Not only is the Presto an important part of the company’s genealogy of sneakers, but it also holds a special place in the hearts of aficionados. More than twenty years later, Hatfield is still in awe of its success.

“In 2000, I just felt we were on to something,” Hatfield said. “It wasn’t supposed to be our highest-performing running shoe that year. It wasn’t intended to be that. But it was supposed to be our most comfortable and maybe provocative, unexpected kind of thing that we could have also have fun with.”

Honorable Mention
Nike Shox R4

by Matt Welty

With its mechanical cushioning units, the Nike Shox R4 is one of the most distinctive athletic footwear designs of the early 2000s. Some have fond memories of the model; others deride it as the ultimate bro shoe, a perfect complement to cargo shorts, a watery beer, and a frisbee in hand. But any way you slice it, it’s an important model from the era, and one of the most influential sneakers of its time.

Air Max is the technology that Nike has built most of its cushioning legacy around. That design, which exposed the Air units in Nike midsoles, was created by Tinker Hatfield in 1987. But three years earlier, in 1984, Bruce Kilgore, the designer of the Air Force 1, flirted with mechanical cushioning. His first prototype looked nothing like the final product; a Nike waffle sneaker was suspended with a massive spring. The idea would never work in retail footwear.

Nike was finally able to nail down the modern Shox concept in 1997, three years before it released the inaugural models. The sneaker’s midsole featured four rubber columns that could absorb impact and return energy, in theory to better the athlete’s performance. Shox appeared on Nike basketball, training, tennis, and running shoes. But the model for the last of these sports is what turned the system into an icon of techy fashion.

The first Shox running shoe, the Shox R4, looked as technical as it sounded. The upper had a metallic fabric, white accents, and bright red Shox along the heel. In its wake, visible tech, something the Air Max series popularized, spread quickly across the industry in more outrageous ways. Adidas, Reebok, and Puma tried it to varying degrees of success. But the Shox was still the gold standard. The R4 had street cred, too. The runner was a staple of Harlem in the age of True Religion jeans, and it’s seen a reemergence uptown with retro versions over the past few years.

The biggest moment for the Shox, however, didn’t come with the R4, but rather its basketball counterpart, the BB4. In the 2000 Summer Olympics, Vince Carter dunked over Frédéric Weis, a 7'2" center from France. Weis, who was drafted by the Knicks, never played in the NBA. He battled alcoholism and depression before moving home. Carter’s feat was labeled the “dunk of death,” and it signaled the beginning of the end of Weis’s career. And it took place in a pair of Nike Shox. It was the colossal “boing” the brand was looking for at the time. Twenty years later, it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t owned a pair of the sneakers.