2009 Nike Air Yeezy 1

by Joe La Puma

By 2008, Kanye West had reached the pinnacle of global influence in pop culture. He’d delivered four exceptional, genre-bending studio albums (The College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation, and 808s &Heartbreak) that yielded over ten Grammy wins and changed the look and feel of hip-hop. But West, who was well on his way to solidifying himself as a generational talent in music, wanted to focus more on design and product. Since he’d come onto the scene in 2003, every outfit, every accessory, and every sneaker he wore was fodder for the blogs, almost a decade before Instagram’s Explore page arrived. He was the kid in fourth grade who drew sneakers in class and the man in 2007 who shaved a Fendi logo into his hair. Now was his time to make his claim as a designer. And it would only be a matter of time until the most influential artist of the day linked with the most dominant sneaker brand in the world.

There’s an infamous photo of West on a private jet, pencil in hand, dripped in a vintage patchwork Nike jacket, drawing sneakers on a fateful trip from Miami to New York. West has said that he’d become inspired following Nike’s “One Night Only” Air Force 1 event in NYC, which celebrated twenty-five years of the iconic Bruce Kilgore design. The drawings he was putting together were heavily influenced by the ’80s classic Back to the Future, the Nike Mag, and his love for anime. Those sketches from 35,000 feet in the air would eventually be brought to Nike’s creative director of special projects, Mark Smith.

From the start, West and Smith tried to marry a design that satisfied the rapper’s out-of-this-world appetite for a futuristic, moonboot-esque sneaker and Smith’s focus on making something that could still seamlessly exist in Nike’s catalog. They worked with former Nike developer Tiffany Beers at the brand’s infamous and ultra-exclusive cook-up center, the Innovative Kitchen, and created tons of prototypes, samples, and designs.

“The original shoes were battery-operated, and they lit up. I have a version of the first shoe that has a push-button on the side, and it lights up and stays lit,” West told Complex in 2009 about an early iteration of the Yeezy 1.

In the end, they revamped a sole from the Air Assault, put their twist on the classic elephant print tooling from the Jordan III (dubbed the “Ylephant patent pattern”), and capped off the design with glow-in-the-dark outsoles. But the centerpiece of the upper was a forefoot strap that added support and reimagined the DNA of Bo Jackson’s Air Trainer 1 from the late ’80s, bringing it into the 2000s. “It felt like a true collaboration,” said Ronnie Fieg, footwear designer and founder and CEO of Kith. “There were key elements of Nike’s history you could see, like the Jordan III/Air Assault midsole, but fused with details that you could feel stemmed from Ye’s signature aesthetic.”

Around 2006 to 2009, the sneaker space was still heavily dominated by classic Air Jordans and the signature sneakers of top-tier NBA athletes. The West/Nike partnership marked the first full nonathlete sneaker collaboration under the Nike umbrella. Although the sneaker wasn’t made for an athlete per se, its function was still crucial. “I always try to look at things through an athlete’s eyes—if you look at a basketball player, his or her performance is on court, in the middle of a game. The equivalent for Kanye would be to get onstage and rock it for a couple of hours,” Smith told Complex in 2009.

With rumors of a West x Nike collaboration reaching fever pitch, the rapper finally debuted the Nike Air Yeezy 1 onstage at the fiftieth annual Grammy Awards in 2008. That night, West paid tribute to his mother, Donda, who had recently passed, and performed “Hey Mama.” The performance hit its apex around a minute and a half in, when West emotionally bent down. This document meant a lot more in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the photo clamoring sneakerheads still pass around over a decade later: West, mic to his side and his eyes closed, in an unreleased sample of a black-on-black Nike Air Yeezy 1, the first clear look at his signature shoe. Just how special is that Grammy pair? As recently as 2017, the never-released makeup was fetching over $100,000 at consignment shop Flight Club.

Even after West debuted the Nike collaboration on the biggest stage, it took the brand two months to officially confirm it. Nike finally sent out a press release on April 6, 2009, that read: “Nike and Kanye West Present the Nike Air Yeezy Sneaker.” At the end of the statement, it was announced that the Nike Air Yeezy would come out in the spring of 2009 in three different colorways: zen grey/LT charcoal in April; black/black in May; and the final net/net in June. “I wanted to give the Yeezys their own colorway. You wouldn’t have a whole fuchsia wall in your house, but you might have a little Jeff Koons piece of art that’s fuchsia and small. So I do it small, on the inside of the tongue,” West said about the subtle pop of color featured on the tongue of the sneakers in his 2009 Complex cover story. In the months leading up to the releases, he wore the three-pack of sneakers courtside, onstage, and in music videos (now’s a good time to revisit Keri Hilson’s 2009 classic “Knock You Down” clip). But as West was continuing to build hype for the sneakers, the rest of the world was strategizing on how it would get them.

Information about how many pairs were created for retail is murky, but West mentioned in the 2009 Complex cover story that there were nine thousand hitting the market. The sneakers were only released at high-end stores around the country, rumored to be less than forty shops nationwide. In Detroit, the boutique Burn Rubber received less than forty pairs. “I think that the Yeezy 1 was historic,” Burn Rubber co-owner Rick Williams remembered. “I can’t speak for anyone else, but we learned a lot from that drop. It definitely ushered in a new era of hype. The Yeezy 1 helped further what we were doing in the boutique world.”

While West’s partnership with Nike was successful from execution, mindshare, and legacy standpoints, it eventually frayed. Shortly after the Nike Air Yeezy 2 was released in 2012, West became vocal about the limitations he felt the brand put on the collaboration. There were onstage rants; the notorious “Facts” diss track, where West rapped about Nike’s treatment of employees; and the instant classic “Hold up, I ain’t trying to stunt, man / But the Yeezys jumped over the Jumpman” bar from the song “New God Flow.” The partnership officially ended in 2013, with West signing with Adidas. West’s main point of contention was the royalties he believed he was owed for the sneakers, but also the constraints he felt from Nike in developing even more products with the brand. In an interview with Charlamagne Tha God in 2018, he got candid about how tough it was when the Nike relationship ended. “When I was young, I used to sketch the Swoosh and everything. It was heartbreaking for me to have to leave Nike, but they refused to allow me to get royalties on my shoe, and I knew I had the hottest shoe in the world,” West said. Later in the same interview, he would apologize to then–Nike CEO Mark Parker for the times he lashed out at the exec and the brand.

Since signing with Adidas, West has gone on to create an absolute industry juggernaut. His Adidas Yeezy line reportedly raked in $1.5 billion in sales in 2019, an accelerated threat to Nike’s biggest subsidiary, Jordan Brand, which generates $3 billion in annual sales. Ironically, Nike has found huge success in tapping West’s long-time inner circle, including Virgil Abloh, Jerry Lorenzo, and Don C, all three of whom have been major drivers of its energy moments in the last five years. Abloh’s design project “The Ten” and subsequent collaborations have been some of the most hyped Nike products of the 2010s.

Still, the Nike Air Yeezy 1 was a revolutionary piece of design that shifted the way brands thought about collaborations and heightened the freedom with which nonathlete pop culture figures could develop product. The substantial staying power of the silhouette that West created is easily measured to this day. Go to any major consignment store around the country and you’ll see the Nike Air Yeezy 1 behind the glass in “trophy” cases and “grail” walls. What Nike and West designed together will forever be a part of sneaker history. And the fact that the Yeezy 1 could be released in 2030 and still seem forward is a testament to West’s knack for pushing design to what he considers perfection.

“Kanye started really taking things to the next level of being influential,” said P. J. Tucker, the NBA’s undisputed sneaker king, who owns one of the world’s most impressive sneaker collections. “Entertainers taking over basketball shoes and sportswear kind of stuff. I don’t know if, in history, anyone has done it the way he has—that shoe, the hype behind it. At that time, Kanye was the hottest in the rap game. When it comes to really influencing people, when you look at the core of influencing people, he’s it. That shoe, at the time, was so anticipated. It might still be one of the most anticipated ever. It’s easily a top ten shoe of all time.”

Honorable Mention
Nike SB Zoom Stefan Janoski

by Lucas Wisenthal

If Stefan Janoski’s Nike SB signature model isn’t one of the best-selling skate shoes of all time, it’s one of the most ubiquitous. Since its launch, the design has appeared in hundreds of colorways and taken numerous forms, a slip-on, a mid, a high-top, and an Air Max–inspired lifestyle model among them. You’d be hard-pressed to find a skater under thirty-five who hasn’t owned a pair. And most nonskaters who have likely weren’t familiar with the pro—a Habitat Skateboards rider from Vacaville, California—prior to lacing up his namesake shoe.

But before the Janoski could reach that level, Nike had to okay the model. And it almost didn’t.

“Everyone hated it,” James Arizumi, senior global creative director of Nike SB and ACG, told Complex UK in 2019. “When we had the first sale presented to our VPs, they basically said to us, ‘How are we supposed to go to Mark Parker and Phil Knight and say this is a signature model?’”

Skate shoes had shrunk to a point that even the Dunk—once an alternative to the overwrought tech of the late ’90s and early 2000s—had begun to look outmoded. But by almost no one’s estimation was skateboarding ready for what was essentially a skateable boat shoe.

As the site Jenkem wrote in 2019, Janoski was adamant that his model have a minimalist design and a flat toe. “It went through some crazy times of people having to deal with the fact that I was right and what they wanted to happen was not happening,” Janoski said. “But if it’s gonna have my name on it, it’s gonna be the way I want.”

The shoe sold so well that a rumor that Nike had bought Janoski’s name for $4 million began to circulate. “What I can tell you,” Janoski told RIDE Channel in 2015, “is that it is most definitely not true.”

For Nike, the model was a win on several levels. While the Dunk had cemented the brand’s spot in skating and drawn sneakerheads to skate shops for limited releases, the revamped ’80s basketball silhouette was not a new product. The Janoski was an entirely new shoe that, though functional for skating, penetrated the mainstream. It did spawn a couple of hyped releases, including the coveted “Digi Camo Floral” makeup from 2013, but its wide appeal is why it remains an integral part of Nike’s skate lineup. It’s also why we’ll probably never see a true successor to the model.

“No, there’s not going to be a Janoski 2,” Janoski told Transworld Skateboarding in 2019. “I always say, ‘It’s better to be right the first time.’”