SUSO

Nike Air Max 1: Birth of an Icon.

Words: Oscar Powell

Tinker Hatfield was a trained architect working at Nike when, after a visit to Paris in the mid-’80s, he pioneered a union between the design of buildings and that of shoes. Paris’ Pompidou Centre, with its inners exposed and its guts threatening to spill out over the Marais, had seeped into his unconscious.

He returned to Oregon, where he and his team were working on running shoes using the already established airbag. They were having problems with the ever-increasing size of the bags. Hatfield, clearly affected by his Parisian sojourn, suggested they expose it, and so free up a little space in the mid-sole. That way people would actually be able to see the air for themselves and Nike could spend less time and money talking about it.

The marketing heads were up in arms. How could they possibly sell a shoe with a hole in the middle? And as for the bright colours of the original designs, the red and the blue also inspired by the colours of the Pompidou, it just didn’t look right. It just wasn’t normal for a shoe.

“When you do something different, you have to have a pretty thick skin,” Hatfield explains. “People are gonna take shots at you and criticse what they don’t understand. I just wanted to push it as far as I could without being fired.”

That was 1987, and it marked the birth of an icon: the Air Max 1, still loved by many, was the first shoe to use the visible airbag, technology that, today, is simply a part of our cultural landscape.