2011 Nike Mag

by Justin Tejada

When filming began on Back to the Future Part II in February 1989, the creators had spent more than two years working on the script and building sets for a movie. From that late-’80s vantage point, the filmmakers had to envisage a world more than two decades in the future, and they did an amazingly prescient job, imagining things that would eventually become reality, such as wearable technology, drones, and video conferencing.

But director Robert Zemeckis and stars Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd could not have imagined when Back to the Future Part II debuted in theaters on November 22, 1989, that one of the film’s most enduring futuristic creations would be a pair of sneakers that is only directly referenced once—and with just four words—a few minutes into the movie’s 105-minute run time.

When Lloyd’s Doc Brown character presents Fox’s Marty McFly with a large black tube adorned with the words “Nike Footwear” in volt lettering, the legend of the Nike Mag is born.

McFly unceremoniously puts them on and the shoes tighten around his foot, prompting him to remark, “Power laces, all right.” That’s it. When Doc meets up with Marty, he focuses on McFly’s jeans, jacket, and hat to make sure they are period-correct for October 21, 2015, but he doesn’t say a word about his footwear.

Nevertheless, the Nike Mag became a grail in the truest sense, its legend fanned by its unattainable nature. For twenty-two years, the Mag was a shoe that could not be had. While it was lusted after on forums like NikeTalk and rumors of a release would occasionally circulate, nothing ever materialized. Then, in 2011, that all changed.

That September, the word went out that the “greatest shoe never made” was actually going to become a reality. With a clever headline that worked on many levels—“It’s About Time”—Nike announced that it was going to create 1,500 pairs of the Mag, with all net proceeds going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Fox had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 and revealed it to the public in 1998. The release of the shoe became an opportunity not only to give sneakerheads what they’d been pining over for so long, but also to raise funds to combat the devastating disease. The shoe would go on to generate millions for the foundation.

None of that was on the minds of the filmmakers. In the original Back to the Future, McFly wore a pair of Nike Bruins. The story goes that Fox showed up to set wearing the white Nikes with the red Swoosh and they became part of his character’s wardrobe. For Nike, which wasn’t the corporate behemoth it is today, the product placement was huge. So when it came time for the sequel, both the brand and the film’s producers wanted to keep McFly in Nikes. “We went to Nike and we said, ‘What would a shoe look like thirty years in the future?’” executive producer Frank Marshall said in a 2011 video from the brand.

Nike put Tinker Hatfield in charge of developing what would become the Mag. By this point, Hatfield had designed the Air Max 1 and the Air Jordan III, but conceiving a shoe that could be worn nearly three decades down the road wasn’t a simple task, even for someone like him. “It wasn’t a normal thing for me to think that far in the future,” Hatfield said in an interview with Colorblind.

Hatfield wasn’t the only rising star charged with working on the Mag. Future CEO Mark Parker, then a designer at Nike, also contributed to the design. One meeting between Hatfield, Parker, screenwriter Bob Gale, and Zemeckis produced an idea that the shoes might levitate, but Hatfield couldn’t wrap his head around why someone would need to levitate and the idea was shelved. Instead, Hatfield reinvisioned the creative brief, looking at the project “like someone had asked me to reinvent footwear for actual performance reasons, in the real world, only I had thirty years to figure the technology out,” he told Wired in 2016.

The result was a shoe that could essentially come alive. It would sense a wearer’s feet and signal this awareness by lighting up and tightening its laces. Though never overtly mentioned, the Mag name comes from the shoe’s ability to adhere to surfaces like the famous hoverboard that McFly zips around on in the movie. Six pairs of Nike Mags were made for the film, including the pair whose power-lacing system actually “worked.” To make it believable during filming in 1989, holes were cut in the Mags, and a prop person was positioned under the street to manually tighten the laces.

Those six pairs were all that fanboys and -girls and sneakerheads had to dream about for more than two decades, until 2011, when Nike finally decided to release a version of the Nike Mag for consumers.

The aesthetics of the shoe matched the movie version to a tee, with each contour of the upper replicated faithfully. LED lights in the heel illuminated with a pinch of the collar on the ultra-high-top silhouette. But one crucial detail was missing: power laces. Remember that the only line that McFly utters about the shoes in the movie is “Power laces, all right,” so it was a disappointment to some when the shoe was released without the key feature.

Still, it was a victory for most fans. Prior to release, there had been a petition signed by more than thirty thousand people, asking Nike to release the shoe. The petition eventually made its way to the desk of Hatfield, who started spearheading the project with the help of Parker and a rising new engineer in Beaverton named Tiffany Beers. It was a rare example of a brand actually responding to direct input from sneaker fans and acting on it.

Fifteen hundred pairs were auctioned over ten days on eBay, ranging in price from $2,300 for a pair of size 7s to $9,959 for a pair of size 10s. The release raised more than $4.7 million for the Michael J. Fox Foundation. In a fortuitous turn of events, the foundation had announced a matching challenge with Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife at the time, Anne Wojcicki, a few months prior to the release of the Mag. With the match, the final amount donated to the foundation was over $9.4 million.

Despite the fervor the sneaker inspired, there was still that pesky issue of the power lacing. Then came NBA All-Star Weekend in 2014. During an appearance at a Jordan Brand event in New Orleans, Hatfield was asked about a version of the Mag that could do what the movie shoe did. “Are we gonna see power laces in 2015? To that, I say, ‘Yes!’” he replied.

Except Hatfield’s pronouncement and timetable had not exactly been vetted by higher-ups at Nike. “It’s not unheard of for me to get things moving in unexpected ways,” he told the New York Times. The prediction was picked up widely in the press, so Hatfield used that as a moment to get the ball rolling. Now all he had to do was figure out how to get a shoe to lace itself.

That job fell primarily to Beers. She’d been poking around the project for a few years by that point, but there was nothing that led her to believe that anything was imminent. All-Star Weekend changed that. Beers put up makeshift walls inside Nike’s renowned R&D studio, the Innovation Kitchen, and dubbed the area the “Black Hole.” As far as things in Beaverton go, it didn’t get much more top secret than that.

The large cutaway section in the bottom of the Air Jordan XX8, another Hatfield creation, gave Beers the idea of a place to house the motor required to tighten the laces. After years of little progress, “everything kind of came together all at once,” Beers told Wired.

The primary recipient of Beers’s innovation was the Nike HyperAdapt 1.0, but you can’t create self-lacing technology and not put it in a Nike Mag. With that in mind, Beers told Complex in 2016, “I grabbed a couple of engineers and said, ‘Today we gotta figure out how to put it in here.’”

The first tweet from the Michael J. Fox Foundation went out at 3:05 p.m. on—when else?—October 21, 2015, the date Doc and Marty travel to in Back to the Future Part II. It said simply, “This is real. This is today. Coming spring 2016. cc:@RealMikeFox @Nike,” and showed a picture of Fox sitting on a chair in a pair of Mags as Emmy awards sat on a shelf behind him. In a subsequently tweeted video, Fox tries on a pair of Mags and you hear a whirring sound as the laces tighten automatically when he applies pressure on the heel. With the same sense of wonder that his character exhibited in the movie, Fox says, “That’s insane. That’s really great.”

Hatfield also sent Fox a handwritten letter, accompanied by a drawing of McFly trying on the shoes in the movie, that started, “Almost thirty years ago we embarked on a journey to create a glimpse into ‘The Future.’ Although the project started as science fiction, we’re now proud to turn that fiction into fact.”

Though the 2015 Mag was originally intended to be available in spring 2016, its release was pushed to October 2016. Only eighty-nine pairs were made. As opposed to the 2011 release, the 2015 edition wasn’t just open to the highest bidder. Fans were able to purchase $10 tickets to a draw, with winners receiving pairs. This approach helped raise $6.75 million for the Michael J. Fox Foundation, bringing the total for the two versions released to more than $16 million.

While the shoe’s place in sneaker and pop culture lore is firmly cemented, it would be even more amazing if the enduring legacy of the Nike Mag was its role in helping to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease. That may seem far-fetched, but, as Mark Parker said, “By imagining the future, we create it.” And it doesn’t even require a DeLorean.

Honorable Mention
Nike Zoom KD IV

by Brendan Dunne

Kevin Durant’s long list of career achievements was considerably more concise back in 2011. He’d earned a couple of MVP designations—one at the McDonald’s All-American Game in 2007 and one at the FIBA World Cup in 2010—but none in the NBA. He had a gold medal from his performance at the 2010 FIBA World Cup, but didn’t yet have any Olympic hardware. And he had his own sneaker line with Nike, but hadn’t released many truly memorable shoes. The turning point for Durant’s footwear résumé came in 2011, with the arrival of his fourth model.

It was the Nike Zoom KD IV that really fulfilled the promise of a signature line, making his shoes more personal. The first two Nike KD models were unremarkable, both middling in their height and their ability to translate any of the greatness of the young Durant into footwear. His third, which released in 2010, was sleeker and sharper, but didn’t feel distinct from other performance basketball designs of the era. The Nike Zoom KD IV broke from the expectations that trilogy created, shortening the silhouette and embracing the standard for low-top basketball shoes set by Kobe Bryant’s fourth model, which came in 2008. It also moved the Swoosh, setting it aside and letting a cross-foot strap dominate the upper.

The Nike Zoom KD IV was one of those rare sneakers that made consumers feel like they were getting some extra value from the brand behind it. At just $95, this brand-new performance basketball offering was considerably cheaper than the retro Air Jordans and Air Maxes sneakerheads were consuming en masse at the time. This helped change how the scene spent its money, resulting in a renewed interest in actual new shoes.

The Nike KD IV also enjoyed a new and brief golden era of design for Nike Basketball, which focused on storytelling through unique and bold colorways. A weatherman-themed version of the KD IV proposed how Durant might have spent his time had that year’s lockout kept him from professional basketball. A Nerf one came complete with a matching hoop and ball. While these early colorways released at the end of 2011 hinted at how great the KD IV could be, the shoe enjoyed an extended period of relevance throughout 2012, thanks to pairs like the “Galaxy” and “Aunt Pearl” editions. The Thunder star also got a gold medal at the Olympics that year, along with a matching colorway of his KD IV to go with it. Durant, and his sneakers, had truly arrived.