2020 Off-White x Air Jordan V

by Brendan Dunne

The directors at the factory couldn’t believe it. They felt trepidation in presenting the project. Was this really what Nike’s designers envisioned? They’d executed the ask, but the final product appeared not so final—it was raw, with exposed foam and stitching that made it look like it was falling apart. The designers were ecstatic. The factory team was confused. That shoe, the original Off-White x Air Jordan 1 collaboration that was released as part of designer Virgil Abloh’s “The Ten” collection in September 2017, redefined a footwear icon and helped reestablish Nike’s dominance at the end of the decade. The overarching project, Abloh’s reinvention of the brand’s retro catalog, is still unfinished.

It is not easy work. Critics of Abloh—the vastly influential artist whose various and sundry positions include CEO of his own Off-White label, men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton, and impossibly prolific DJ at nightclubs across the globe—will claim slapping his signature quotation marks on any product is a shortcut to hype and resale market buzz. But this complaint ignores the delicate equation of his sneaker portfolio under the Nike umbrella. The Off-White x Air Jordan V, released in February 2020, is the smartest example of this work.

The success of the ten-shoe range that contained his first Jordan 1 owes to its balance of reverence for genre staples and willingness to reinterpret them. This means confounding factories by making them rethink what an Air Jordan should look like. This means challenging stodgy sneakerheads who cling to the idea that the present and future have nothing to add to the models from the past that they love.

“It’s tough to do that, knowing how sacred these are to these kids,” said Gemo Wong, senior designer of special projects at Jordan Brand.

The Nike sub-brand trades heavily on nostalgia and retro product, so it makes sense that its most devoted consumers flinch at the idea of altering an icon. For it to do so successfully, it needs the license of a collaborator like Abloh. The whole idea of collaborations was an extremely tired one by 2020, the era of Everyone x Everything, but in this case the outside partner is truly doing something the brand can’t on its own. And he’s doing it with a careful eye toward tradition—remember, Abloh grew up just outside of Chicago while Michael Jordan was at the height of his powers.

“He’s always been respectful of retro colors, and he adds just that little twist,” Wong said of Abloh. “We’ll always look at an original colorway and how we could respect it yet push it in other ways—whether that’s form or material.”

That pushing is crucial to the Off-White x Air Jordan V, a shoe created to make it look like a time capsule from the future landed in 1990, the year of the original Jordan V’s release, and aged to perfection for thirty years. It is a love letter to that model, written in Abloh’s idiolect. There are white laces, just like how Jordan wore them. The soles arrive pre-yellowed to mimic natural aging, making them look like they came out of a collector’s closet after years-long hibernation. The dingy tint was a challenge to Jordan norms; in the earlier part of the decade, the brand worked hard to make sure the translucent rubber bottoms on shoes like the Jordan V wouldn’t turn color with age. As part of the solution, it injected them with an icy blue. Abloh tossed that progress out, opting for a patina that veteran collectors know well.

How else did he twist the formula? He literally poked holes in the Jordan V—the shoe has circles on its upper where the materials are cut away, with only a thin film layer left. The Swiss cheesing of the silhouette is meant to evoke the magic of Nike’s Air technology embedded in the soles. Where Tinker Hatfield, the silhouette’s original designer, made that cushioning visible with windows in the midsoles of shoes like the Air Max 1 and the Jordan V, Abloh extended it by allowing even more air in.

“The circles, to be honest, were supposed to be fully cut out on the medial and the lateral. I made the call to not do that full cut-out,” said Wong, explaining that he put the onus on Abloh to extend the conversation around the design once it came out.

The Off-White designer did so by posting a video of himself carving out those circles. If his first Nike releases looked unfinished, this was Abloh communicating that his latest Jordan was the same way and empowering those lucky enough to buy the super-limited shoes to finish the job. Not only did he have the audacity to alter a shoe many consider perfect, he was telling followers on social media to take a knife to it.

Is that blasphemy? Is it heretical to try to recast the creations of Jordan and Hatfield, both gods of their fields? For Don C, who is three years Abloh’s senior and thus spent more time worshipping the Chicago Bulls, yes. But, he adds, that’s what makes Abloh a great designer. “I’m so embedded, it’s like a religion, almost, to me,” said Don, a fellow Chicago-area designer, longtime friend of Abloh, and member of the same extended circle of Kanye West–adjacent creatives. “When you a religious person, you’re not gonna wear a T-shirt of Jesus Christ upside down. You just ain’t gon’ do that. That graphic might look cool, though. That hindrance is what makes me not that good of a designer.”

Don says that, by contrast, Abloh is so successful because he is less precious with such idols. That’s what allows him to take a Jordan V and strip the original padding away, hollowing out the chunky collar and creating something slimmer and more modern. That’s what makes Off-White’s Nikes more striking and resonant in 2020 than, say, the work of Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Fragment Design label. Was the Fragment x Air Jordan 1 from 2014 an elegant update to a classic sneaker? Yes, but it was too elegant, perhaps burdened by Fujiwara’s own long and deep history in sneakers. Abloh’s sneakers do not operate under the same pressure.

“He has all the input, and he’s the teenager during the Jordan era and everything,” said Don of Abloh. “But he wasn’t as into it as I was, so it doesn’t mean as much to him. He can be more free with it.”

Does that put a retro-focused entity like Jordan Brand in a difficult position when it comes to liberties like these? Definitely. Wong admits to worrying about letting someone tweak something held in such high regard. But the process is not without checks and balances, and Abloh’s Off-White x Air Jordan V sneaker did receive perhaps the most important cosign during its incubation.

“Getting MJ’s thoughts on it was huge,” Wong said. “He blessed it, thank God.”

If the Jumpman himself blessed it, surely it should be good enough for the formalists in his congregation. Showing such a reworked shoe to Jordan, who originally made it iconic, is a bold move, but none of these shoes were first designed with a particular respect for tradition. None of the great steps forward in sneaker design were prompted by an adherence to old rules. Tinker Hatfield was not a sneakerhead. Just like Abloh, actually, he studied as an architect before switching careers.

Abloh is still switching them—with each new quarter, it feels like he is involved with a new discipline. The extremely busy schedule he keeps (on the advice of his doctor, Abloh had to slow himself down in late 2019 and cancel all travel for three months) means that he doesn’t have enough hours in a day to be a full-time sneaker designer. Wong says Abloh hasn’t really been working at Nike and Jordan Brand’s world headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, since the original “The Ten” project years ago. These days, he trades feedback remotely, via WhatsApp. Abloh has spent enough time sharpening his vision to be able to design from a distance.

“What I love about Virgil, he’s created such a design code,” Don said. “He doesn’t even have to design.”

This code allows him to maximize his reach and pace. It’s what lets him go from launching one of the most hyped Nike collections of all time to releasing a furniture range with Ikea to making a custom Patek Philippe watch for Drake in an impossibly compact time frame. It is Bauhaus in spirit, spreading Abloh’s art via mass production. Well, relatively speaking—“mass production” may be an odd term to connect to relatively limited affairs like his Nikes, but even Abloh has said he has no interest in making his product so scarce. His practice in projects like the Off-White x Air Jordan V is to give this code to a capable team and trust it to deliver.

The people entrusted with that duty at Jordan Brand included Israel Mateo, a Swoosh veteran who rose through the ranks at hyper-cool Nike retail spots like 21 Mercer, and Paul Savovici, a relative newcomer who didn’t have much of a sneaker background before starting at Nike in 2013. Their job was essentially to translate Abloh’s ideas to sneaker form.

The designer had a prescriptive notion about creating a project that was “retro future.” For the first part of the term, Mateo and Savovici made trips to the Department of Nike Archives, where the brand houses its most treasured relics, to study the aging processes of original Jordans. With the second in mind, they rebuilt the shoe with transparent materials so it would appear even sleeker. Time was of the essence, both in the project’s theme and in practical terms—changes were made on the Off-White x Air Jordan V right up to the last minute.

The team of Mateo and Savovici on the task is something like a Venn diagram, the intersection of their work on the collaboration reflecting Abloh’s background. Mateo, although he shuns the term, is the sneakerhead of the two. His name stayed scrawled on a wall in the stockroom of a Foot Locker in Menlo Park, New Jersey, well after he left the retail chain. Savovici (who left the brand in 2020) came to Nike, and eventually Jordan, fresh off a NASA internship after studying industry and product design at the Rhode Island School of Design. One is fluent in the importance of various coveted Nike styles from the 2000s. One is not weighed down by too many inhibitions about why those styles, or ones from years before, shouldn’t be touched. Abloh, through the balance and equation of work like the Off-White x Air Jordan V, is both.

The project is about maintaining the integrity of the original Jordan V idea while working past preconceptions and inhibitions. It proposes, audaciously, that, with the right alterations, the timeless shoe could be even better. It exists outside the more rigid inline catalog of Jordan Brand, employing an openness—quite literally, thanks to those holes—not possible without a partner like Abloh. It doesn’t, however, lose sight of the designer’s affinity for Air Jordan history. The combination of the original black and metallic colorway remains, filtered through a diaphanous treatment that reads like a lens looking back in time. The directions of backward and forward were there on the original Jordan V, too, an innovative design in 1990 that looked to World War II fighter jets for inspiration.

The Off-White x Air Jordan V suggests that the sneakers we love are to be viewed as dynamic, and not static, pieces of design. It says that even after the work of a shoe’s creator is over, the work might still be unfinished. There are collars to resculpt. There are still holes to cut out. There are visions from the future that can alter how we see a particular retro. Even when we cross the finish line, there may still be a ways to go. In fact, if a certain Nike adage is to be believed, there is no finish line.

Honorable Mention
Nike Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT%

by Brendan Dunne

The Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT% changed the way we think about sneakers. That’s not sportswear marketing hyperbole. The design, a high-tech model made specifically for marathons, challenged notions of just how much footwear should be allowed to enhance the abilities of the wearer. It had Nike’s competitors questioning the ethics of creating something that really could make you run faster. It was almost banned from competitions in the process.

The story of the shoe goes back to May 2017 at Nike’s Breaking2 event, a three-man race engineered with the goal of recording the first sub-two-hour marathon. None of the participants managed to beat the two-hour mark, but Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge came close, at 2:00:25. They all wore the Zoom Vaporfly Elite, which used a controversial carbon-fiber plate in the midsole to maximize energy return. Nike never gave that model a proper release, but it crafted a whole line around the silhouette that reshaped the look of its running shoes. The Zoom Vaporfly 4% from 2017 and the 2019 Zoom Vaporfly NEXT% started dominating marathons, leading many to complain that Nike had taken running shoe technology too far.

Then the impossible happened. Kipchoge did it. In October 2019, he completed a marathon with an astonishing time of 1:59:40. (Like his Breaking2 time, it’s not technically a world record, as it wasn’t run in standard marathon conditions.) He ran in a prototype version of the Alphafly NEXT%, logging a time so bold that detractors suspected that the international governing body of track and field would ban the shoes—especially considering the unfair edge they could give Nike runners in the 2020 Summer Olympics.

The Alphafly NEXT%, which got a limited release in February 2020, is even more advanced than its predecessors. When purists said Nike took things too far, the brand went even further. Working in unison with the carbon-fiber plate on the new shoe was a set of Zoom Air pods on the forefoot. The foam looked chunkier. Still, it escaped being halted by history. When new rules around competition-acceptable running shoes were announced in January 2020, the Alphafly NEXT% was safe. The sneaker didn’t enjoy the grand stage it was meant for in 2020—COVID-19 pushed back the Olympics to 2021, and any sort of outdoor activity was rendered risky. That’s OK, though. A shoe that was always a step ahead can probably afford to wait until next year.