The tradition has continued beyond Jordan’s retirement, and Nike is currently on the Nike Air Jordan 37

The tradition has continued beyond Jordan’s retirement, and Nike is currently on the Nike Air Jordan 37. Throughout, Nike Air Jordans have always represented the pinnacle of sneaker design, and are unmatched when it comes to quality, craftsmanship, materials, innovation, performance and style. We take a closer look at 5 of the most popular Jordans, including rare Nike Jordan 1s and popular releases of the Nike Jordan 4. In a vacuum, the Banned story is a triumph of marketing—taking one detail and successfully using it to build feverish hype for a new product and face of the company. But its place in the larger Jordan narrative makes it a myth of its own: a sneaker that was so revolutionary that the league had to shut it down, worn by a player who would revolutionize the game itself. It almost doesn’t matter today that the story appears to be apocryphal. Every legend needs an origin story. The best sometimes have a little bit of fiction mixed in. Air Max didn’t come into the picture until 1987. Footwear designer Tinker Hatfield introduced the idea of making the Air cushioning visible to the eye, doing so on the Air Max 1 running shoe. At the time, running footwear was extremely plain, so he chose to do something completely different to align with the changing times of pop culture. So, the Air Max 1, the first sneaker with visible Air, debuted in 1987. Since then, a long history of Air Max running shoes have released, each named after the year it was released. Air Maxes are considered to be extremely important to sneaker culture as many collectors searched far and wide for limited editions and collaborations with Parra, Sean Wotherspoon, and atmos. Nike became a mainstream shoe, having previously been known mainly as a track running shoe, slipped into popular culture as the edgy must-have sneaker, and is now one of the most recognised brands on the planet.

The throwback moment of the early 2000s allowed Jordan Brand to revisit classic designs and help the relatively new Nike branch grow. However, the decision to lean into them may have also been one of necessity: Mayden says that the brand’s design team was short-staffed at the time and couldn’t meet the market demand for new shoes. “It became a good business strategy to relieve the pressure off the designers from having to create every single thing new,” he says. “It was a beautiful moment to be at the beginning of what now is just the norm.” A lot of the marketing around the shoes was more like that of a car promotion, says DeLeon, who’s not sure of the exact number of pairs he owns – he acquired five or six in the past month, and has somewhere in the 100s in total. In 1989, adverts were released, “very Spike Lee style”, as DeLeon puts it, in which Lee appears as Mars Blackmon, his character from his film She’s Gotta Have It. In the ads, he questions Jordan on what makes him the best player in the universe, and repeatedly says, “it’s gotta be the shoes!” Teaming up with Lee on the adverts was a savvy move. It was, says DeLeon, unprecedented for any brand to tap into the cultural zeitgeist like that. “I think that was the moment that, ‘ok, these are a status symbol,'” he says. On Saturday, Nike will re-release the shoe in its infamous Chicago Bulls colors. And even though Nike is releasing a reported 500,000 pairs, it will likely sell out in minutes. “You feel seen wearing this pair of shoes because there’s no one more visible than the person whose name that the shoe bears,” says Waithe, who recently created the sneaker-culture show You Ain’t Got These for Quibi. “You don’t get more visible than him.

You don’t get more magical than him. You don’t get more superhuman than him.” Part of the reason the AJ1 is still so beloved is the look. Peter Moore’s finest sneaker features a distinct yet classic design that pops without being too showy, and it was the only signature Jordan until the XXXI to contain a swoosh. It’s also the most utilitarian Air Jordan: “You can play basketball in it, you can skate in it, you can wear it to a fashion show—I mean, you can literally wear it anywhere,” says Houston Rockets forward P.J. Tucker, whose first basketball shoes were the AJ1s his mother bought him as he was growing up in North Carolina. For the Air Jordan 5, Tinker Hatfield took design cues from the P-51 Mustang fighter jet, an American-made plane used by Allied forces in World War II. The Air Jordan 5’s aggressive Mustang-inspired silhouette embodies Jordan’s dominant on-court style, while signature shark-tooth detailing on the midsole pays homage to “The Shark,” a version of the P-51 embellished with cartoonish shark teeth. Like its predecessors, this cheap jordan 1 Brand sneaker also represents a number of design firsts: the first Jordan shoe with a clear outsole, it was also the first to feature reflective 3M material on the tongue and a molded ankle collar. But the brand also has a secret weapon: the legend of MJ himself, and the way the AJ1s can tell it. The Shattered Backboard in 2015, for example, resurfaced a long-forgotten piece of the myth of MJ, while the 2009 DMP “Bulls Celtics” pack commemorates an upstart MJ’s breakout performance against the Celtics in the 1986 playoffs. Something like the Air Ship retro isn’t just a smart business decision—it’s a nod to MJ’s roots, an addition to the canon. The AJ1, more than any other version of the shoe, is the perfect canvas for storytelling.

More than a third of trades since October 1 on Tradeblock, an app that lets collectors trade sneakers, have included a Jordan 1. The closets of Tradeblock members contain more than 250,000 pairs of Jordan 1s, according to the company. ThereThere are more than 1,000 different Jordan 1s on GOAT, making it the sneaker marketplace app’s biggest shoe by volume. But there aren’t many before 2001. There’s the original 1985 lineup, including the black and red Breds, the Chicagos, a sample shoe in Syracuse colors, and a pair of Metallic Blues that are listed for $5,000. There’s the 1994 pack, which you could complete for as a little as $1,585, assuming you can fit into men’s sizes 8 and 8.5. And then for seven years, there’s nothing. Jason Mayden’s story helps to explain why that changed around the turn of the century. The Jordans Rule: The Sneaker at the Heart of the Billion-Dollar Collecting Boom At first glance at the black and white photo, the shoes Jordan wore in his Madison Square Garden debut on October 18, 1984, could be mistaken for the infamous AJ1s: They’re black and red leather high-tops with the words “Air Jordan” emblazoned on the back. But closer inspection reveals something else: the tongue and toe box don’t belong to the AJ1, and the collar and heel lack the distinctiveness of Peter Moore’s design. These were the shoes the NBA referenced in its 41-word note to Nike. They were also an entirely different model: the Air Ships, a general-release sneaker that got a soft push in company ads.