The Nike Air Max – An Ode

In the spring of 1995 as I was nearing the end of my senior year, Sheryl Crow’s ‘All I Want to Do [is have some fun]’ was tearing up the charts, Mel Gibson’s Scottish epic, Braveheart, was premiering in Seattle, Michael Jordan had just come back to the Bulls from his 17-month “retirement”, Major League Baseball had just ended its longest-ever strike that had cancelled the end of the 1994 season.

These were heady times for me as I had just gotten promoted to the computers section at Sears in the mall near my home. Working a part-time job in high school wasn’t the greatest and I was always tired after long days of school and extra-curriculars followed by a shift at work, but it beat the alternative of just being broke. As the eldest of 6 children and with a family that had recently fallen upon hard times, my job meant I could go see Dumb and Dumber and Speed in theaters with my friends, own Street Fighter II and Super Metroid for my SNES, and put gas and oil in my dirty white 1989 Dodge Omni.

Sears required that I wear a suit and tie to work each day which didn’t really bother me because the pay was good compared to my previous job slinging burritos at Taco Bell. One day as I strolled through the mall on my lunch break in my ill-fitting charcoal suit headed for the food court something caught my attention from the window of Foot Locker. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was to be a fateful moment.

My mom did a great job of helping our family live contentedly despite frequently being below the poverty line. We got by on 15-year-old furniture, ate generic-brand cereal, only went on vacations to grandma’s house, and trafficked extensively in hand-me-downs. I wouldn’t say I ever did without something I really needed, but there was one thing that I’d always been dissatisfied with as long as I could remember.

My mom grew up on a cattle farm in the 50s and 60s as one of 8 kids, and her idea of shoes was anything that kept the manure from getting between your toes. She used to take me down to Farm and Fleet and size me up for the cheapest, sorriest excuses for footwear you’ve ever seen. In my Mother’s Brain was this rocket-science-level calculation happening where the size of my new shoes wasn’t what actually fit me but rather what I wouldn’t outgrow before they were destroyed from use or stunk so bad they weren’t allowed in the house anymore.

The worst pair of “sneakers” I ever owned were this brand-less, traction-less amalgamation of plastic and polyester that my mom bought me when I was 12. They were all black with a single-piece, stiff outsole that had worn down like an old set of tires to a pair of slicks within the first year of owning them. The uppers had attempted some vague name-brand approximation, but they were likewise made of single-mold synthetic materials roughly sewn to the bottom half. Throw in a pair of barely-padded insoles that would make Dr. Scholls roll over in his grave and a pair of dollar-store laces whose aglets fell off the first time you laced them up and there you go! They were so uncomfortable and worthless that I complained about them constantly. My Mom’s rejoinder was always the same: shoes are shoes, the expensive ones are just making you pay for the logo. This was a lie and we both knew it, but she had her dignity to defend and 14 other feet to put shoes on.

In the whole of my childhood, she relented just once.

When I was 12, I had a plantar’s wart that had grown until it threatened to eat the bottom of my foot. The treatment was a brutal application of liquid nitrogen and I ended up with a blister the size of the quarter and was nearly unable to walk for several weeks. Once I healed up enough that I was able to start wearing shoes again, my Farm and Fleet torture shoes were obviously  agonizing and my Mom took me to Payless Shoe Source which was the lap of luxury as far as she was concerned. I saw a gleaming white pair of shoes with a crimson swoosh and fixated on them. They probably cost $15 to my usual $8 budget which was 50% more than she was used to paying, but my pitiful wart foot and relentless begging triumphed.

And my idée fixe was born.

Those red and white Nike Cortez’s were the most comfortable pair of shoes I’d ever owned by an order of magnitude. There’s a reason when Jenny gave a pair to Forrest Gump he called them “the best gift anyone could ever get in the wide world”. If I hadn’t been at the business end of my puberty-driven growth spurt, I probably would never have given them up, but eventually my toes burst through the nylon and they had to be retired. And we went back to Farm and Fleet.

To say I developed a Nike fetish over the next 6 years would be an understatement. I noticed people’s shoes the way a seagull notices unattended French fries. But in the same way teenage boys in 1995 put posters of Claudia Schiffer on their bedroom walls, my dreams of $100 sneakers went unrequited.

While 17-year-old me loved a nice pair of Jordans as much as the next red-blooded male, I’d been particularly attracted to Nike’s Air Max line since the first time I saw a pair in the wild. They completely captivated my attention. How could you go wrong with a transparent bubble of pillowy air right there under your heel? If someone wearing a pair had been talking to me they might have said, “Hel-lo! My eyes are up here!” I probably wouldn’t have even heard them.

Since the Air Max was introduced in 1987, Nike hadn’t strayed much from their original design of a transparent air pouch tucked away in the midsole under the heel visible from either side. But I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how revolutionary and high-tech the little oval with 3 portals to the other side felt back then. Shoes didn’t have windows, they just had foam midsoles. End of story.

Then in 1993 Nike branched out slightly with the Air Max 270 with air soles that were visible from the sides AND bottom. And then the Air Max 93 which had a wraparound design which added color inside the air soles. But the uppers of those shoes were as uninspiring as a children’s movie whose message is to believe in yourself. Nike had painted themselves into a corner by marketing the Air Max line exclusively to runners. The uppers featured tired out running-shoe designs not unlike the infamous (and immortal) Air Monarch AKA “Dad Shoes”.

Enter the Air Max 95.

To say that as I glanced into Foot Locker that day in the spring of 1995 I heard the proverbial choir of angels singing “aaaaaaahhh” and saw a light coming from the top shelf would be a bit hyperbolic, but just. These shoes were my destiny.

First of all, the otherwise muted design was punctuated at the top by NEON GREEN highlights. They immediately popped out from every other shoe in the store. I slowly walked towards the shelf and the myriad of details started to wash over me like waves: the black outsoles, the visible air chambers in the forefoot, the six rib-like channels down the sides, the striated layers of materials in graduated grayscale that made them look like a topographical map, the netted shroud stabilizing the lace straps that made them look sporty without overdoing it, the tiny and subtle highlight swoosh on the heel… When I finally recovered enough from my stupor to pick one up I was rewarded by another cascade of details: the soft feel of the pseudo-suede uppers, the silver contoured heel reflector, the seven (7!) air panels visible from 3 sides including the heel with the PSI embossed on them (one of the telltale signs you’ve got an original for you collectors out there), the creases in the tongue, the all-new oval airmax logo in tasteful lowercase where the r is combined with the m but set off by color, the silver 3M scotchlite reflective material on the tongue that hid the laces, the round laces, the neon insoles… These were the most futuristic-looking shoes I’d ever seen. And as if all of that weren’t enough, there were hidden touches such as colored highlights in the outsole, and a cat’s-eye-shaped panel spanning the arch with a pixelated pattern and a map of the air pressure of the three air chambers labeled in pounds per square inch. I didn’t know the science of the 5, 20, and 25 PSI chambers, but I imagined a room full of scientists in white lab coats arriving at exactly those numbers after years of experimentation.

I later came to find out that this shoe was the brain child of designer Sergio Lozano. He was a relatively new designer at Nike and when he was asked to develop a design for Nike’s stagnating Air Max line he was told to “take a risk with his next project ” and “do something we’ve never seen before”. So he did. Many of his ideas such as black midsoles and lack of a prominent swoosh were such a radical departure from the status quo that his preliminary sketches were flat out rejected by the establishment and he had to make a few compromises to make it to production. But in a case of “history is written by the victors”, his design was a hit with the public and has remained a fashion icon for 25 years and counting. History would look back on this moment as a watershed in footwear design. But this moment wasn’t about history, it was about me and the most beautiful pair of shoes I’d ever laid eyes on…

I must have been standing there with my mouth agape as a salesperson tried to get my attention, “Sir… Sir, can I help you?”

“Um. Yeah. Can I try these on in a size eight-and-a-half?”

“Sure. I’ll be right back.”

This was back before shoes came laced from the factory, so I sat there taking in the details and falling more in love as I pulled the wad of tissue paper from inside and began lacing them up. It’s common now to have straps that traverse laterally across the foot securing the laces, but at the time I’d never seen it before. Putting them on revealed yet another hidden treasure: the tongue was stabilized inside the shoe by a pair of elastic straps that kept them perfectly in place and kind of hugged your foot even before you’d laced them up. I stood up and took a few steps and found them to be more comfortable than any pair of shoes I’d ever owned--not difficult considering I had just taken off a pair of hand-me-down imitation oxfords that were probably more polish than shoe. I took a few steps and hopped around a bit as if I knew how to test-drive a pair of high-end running shoes.

As I stood there looking in the shoe mirror in my used-car-salesman suit and future shoes, I had already made up my mind: I MUST HAVE THESE SHOES. Good thing I hadn’t looked at the price tag yet.

“How much??” I said to the salesperson and gulped. That’s right. $140. That was a fortune. If my Mother had known I’d even entertained paying that much for a pair of shoes she might have died. I’m sure when she saw them and inevitably asked how much I paid for them I lied. Adjusted for inflation 20 years later these shoes would set you back $240. I didn’t have that much money. That was an entire paycheck. But I wasn’t willing to let those shoes out of my sight so I put $40 down and put them on layaway. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking of them. During every lunch break I would find myself back at the Foot Locker, like a siren song pulling me in. It took a month of saving every penny, bringing lunches from home, and forgoing the newest blockbusters, but finally I’d saved enough to bring them home.

And since that time my love affair with the Nike Air Max only grew.

Nowadays you can find a new pair for about $170. Which means they haven’t kept pace with inflation which is good news if you’re looking for a pair. You can occasionally stumble across a less-popular colorway on clearance for closer to $100, but usually those are unpopular for a reason. Rare versions can only be found on the secondary market and can run as high as $3,000.

Sure, there was a little bit of form before function going on here. For starters, they weren’t great running shoes and the early versions had problems with the airbags rupturing. On some models the adhesive holding the airbags in the midsoles would start to come loose and would emit a distinctive squeak as you walked. But no matter. Like so what if Claudia Schiffer has one crooked toe on each foot. She’s still freaking Claudia Schiffer.

And I’m clearly not the only fan. Five years ago, Wired Magazine called it, “arguably…the best Nike shoe ever made.” This shoe has been everywhere. Comic strips, crime scenes, commercials, rap videos, Time Magazine…you name it. It’s been collaborated on, sung about, and released in over 150 colorways. Some versions have been inspired. Others downright stupid. Some of them have been really weird. Early on in its life, the appetite for these shoes, particularly in East Asia, was so enthusiastic that prices soared to ten times original retail and stories of people being mugged for their AM 95s were more than just tall tales.

My original pair eventually wore out and had to be thrown away. The shelf life of polyurethane midsoles is only about 10 years anyway. But since 1995, the resurgent popularity of the Air Max has guaranteed me constant access to new production and unique colorways. And continued innovation has helped keep them fresh while still retaining the classic design. I’ve gone through maybe 12 or 13 pairs…I’ve lost count at this point. Currently I own 4 pairs in cool grey, premium navy, essential blue, and winter utility and I’m on the hunt for the perfect colorway for my next cop—maybe OG Volt Yellow if I can find them. 

This year is the 25^th anniversary of my first true shoe love and I hope that in another 25 years I can still find a fresh pair to buy and take me back to that fateful day in 1995 when I put on the most beautiful pair of shoes I have ever worn.