30 years of Nike Air Max
“Get you steppin in your Air Max BOUNCE!
You cockin it back but where it at? BOUNCE!”
When Redman brought the Nike Air Max into his track I’ll Bee Dat, he wasn’t merely paying lip service to the monolithic presence of sportswear brand Nike. The New Jersey-born rapper was name-dropping a line of shoes that, in the past 30 years, have made an indelible mark on pop culture.
Sunday 26 March 2017 marks 30 years since the launch of the Air Max 1 – since then more than 3.5 billion Air Max shoes have come out of Nike’s 24/7 complex in Portland, Oregon.
While the design of the Nike Air Max is often attributed to Nike designer Tinker Hatfield, the shoe can trace its lineage to the 1980’s when David Forland, Nike’s Director of Cushioning Innovation, joined the team. Throughout the 1980’s, Forland hand-built prototypes of Air-Soles (Nike’s term for the bags of pressurised air located inside their shoes). He laid the groundwork for a new breed of shoe when he began experimenting with larger amounts of cushion in the shoe’s sole, giving the wearer a ‘walking-on-air’ feeling.
“Air-Sole units were becoming thinner and thinner to make the manufacturing process easier,” Forland said. “We wanted to get back to injecting more air in to the sole to achieve a strong cushioning sensation under the foot.”
The idea of putting air cushioning in a Nike shoe was not entirely new – that first appeared in the Nike Tailwind in 1978 – but the practice of putting a large cushion at the heel of the shoe was instrumental in providing the Air Max owner with a feather-light wearing sensation.
The shoes continued to evolve throughout the years, giving us models like the Air Structure Triax 91, the Air Tailwind 92 and the Air Max Racer. The Nike Air Max 93 saw the practice of blow moulding applied to Nike’s shows. Using this innovative technique, Air-Soles could be crafted to fit the curvature of the shoe’s forefoot. The Nike Air Max 95, which had two blow-moulded Air-Soles, was the brand’s first time putting visible air in the forefoot of the shoe.
“I remember the first blow-molded Air-Sole unit,” Forland said. “We worked so hard on that and had no idea if people would embrace it.
“I was at an airport right around the time the first Air Max sneaker launched. I was calling a tech in the lab when someone walked by wearing a pair. I stared at him from the phone booth and said, ‘Somebody bought them. I see the Air-Sole going up and down.’ It was a big risk, but a bigger reward.”
In 1997, Air Max saw another breakthrough. Nike designers worked out how to craft an Air-Sole that covered the entire length of the shoe, marking a step forward toward the goal of a fully foamless Air Max. After numerous prototypes, the Air Max 97 was born.
By the mid-1990’s, the shoes had become insanely popular, so much so that “Air Max hunting” – robbing or holding up someone for their Air Max shoes – was said to be a bona fide phenomenon in Japan. The period known as the Air Max “golden era” to shoe connoisseurs came to pass in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
With the Air Max 360 in 2006, nearly 20 years after the Air Max 1, Nike developers finally achieved the goal of a foamless shoe – a welcomed milestone due to foam’s tendency to break down over time.
The Nike Air Max had already become an institution by the mid to late 2000’s. Forland and his team, however, were still looking at ways to innovate the shoe. They set their sights on making the Air Max a more versatile, movement-minded shoe. More recent iterations of the Air Max have seen deep grooves built into the shoes’ Air-Soles, providing greater flexibility for athletes and Air Max aficionados alike.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Air Max this month, Nike have released an assortment of retro shoes, remakes and innovations – the Nike Air Max 90 Ultra Flyknit, the Nike Air Max 1 Master and the Nike Air Max 1 atmos Elephant make up just a handful of the new shoes launching in March. The new line-up will include the highly anticipated March 26th launch of the Nike Air VaporMax, which promises a totally reinvented air cushioning system.
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