That, to me, showed how broad Serena’s reach is. All throughout the tournament, most of the images were taken during the warmups, because she didn't wear the boots during the match. The next day, they’re on the front page of USA Today. “Later that night, I flipped on SportsCenter, and there were the boots. “She came walking out at the US Open like she’s on the Paris runway,” Smith says, “and the tournament directors say, ‘Hey, Serena, those boots are a little over the top.’ They’re pretty conservative, warm up in them. I’ve always challenged Nike to think bigger and more fashion forward in their designs.”ĭesigner Wilson Smith answered that call with the tennis great’s first signature shoe, a slick Shox model with a detachable knee-high, boot-like extension that doubled as a compression sleeve to ward off cramping. “I wanted to be daring and bold both on and off the court. “I wanted to make sport and fashion more synonymous,” Williams says. It was heavy." 1990sįrom the moment she signed with Nike in 2003, Serena Williams had one simple goal. “What was especially moving was the fact that this technology has real-life applications for people with various impairments, including Parkinson's disease. “It was amazing to see a sci-fi idea become a reality,” Fox says. More than two decades later, the Air Mag changed the game again when Nike released the shoe twice-initially without the power laces in 2011, and then with them in 2016-in support of Fox’s foundation, raising more than $16 million for Parkinson’s research. They were a mood changer and a game changer." “I was so amazed by the design, the practicality, and just how frickin’ cool they were. “I was grumpy that day, but when they opened the case, I asked Tinker question after question after question,” Michael J. “Our special effects guys lay on the ground, and when he touched the shoes, they pulled the wires and tightened the laces.” Fox standing on this fake piece of asphalt with all these wires running under it,” says Bob Gale, one of the film’s co-writers.
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Of course, to make the technology work in 1989, it required a little bit of movie magic. “I storyboarded the scene where he puts on the shoes and says, ‘Power laces, all right!” “I thought about how a shoe might have an artificial intelligence that could recognize you and then shape to your foot,” Hatfield says, of the sneaker that automatically ties itself on Michael J. When the producers of Back to the Future Part II asked Nike to create a sneaker from 26 years in the future, Tinker Hatfield’s imagination instantly came alive. “Through that exchange, it accelerates our own culture of thinking and innovating.” “Outside collaborations push us toward the edges as a company,” says Mark Parker, Nike’s executive chairman and former CEO. But since the early aughts, the Swoosh has courted a vastly wider array of talent, working with generational hitmakers like Kanye West and Drake, cult art heroes like Tom Sachs and Futura, and fashion world luminaries like Virgil Abloh, Jun Takahashi, and Rei Kawakubo.
The superstars, for the first three decades or so, were almost entirely athletes we all knew on a first-name basis: Michael, Bo, Tiger, Serena.
And Steve Prefontaine was the otherworldly athlete whose gutsy style and cult of personality lent the Nikes on his feet a sheen of credibility and transcendent cool.įor 50 years, Nike has hewed pretty closely to that basic formula-weaving together bleeding-edge innovation and galactic superstars, and then backing them with savvy industrialism-as it mushroomed into a global powerhouse. Bill Bowerman, Knight’s former college track coach, was the tireless tinkerer who sliced open his running shoes to make adjustments and commandeered his wife’s waffle iron to develop new rubber soles. Phil Knight was the fearless entrepreneur who foresaw the rise of running culture.