The story
A shoe with a window.
Before 26 March 1987, Nike Air was a thing you trusted on faith. There was a pocket of pressurised gas in the midsole, the company would tell you. On 26 March 1987, you could see it.
Tinker Hatfield was an architect before he was a designer of shoes. He had built buildings. When Nike asked him to design a runner in the mid-1980s, he did the thing the architect in him already knew how to do — he asked which buildings he liked, and made the shoe behave like one.
He chose the Centre Pompidou. In Paris, on the rue Saint-Martin, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers had — a decade earlier — designed a museum whose mechanical guts were on the outside. The pipes were exterior. The structural truss was exterior. You could see the building work. Hatfield wanted that. He cut a window into a shoe.
It is the kind of design decision whose lineage is, once you see it, obvious; and which, before someone saw it, had not occurred to anyone. Every Air Max since has had a window. The window started here.
- Year of release
- 1987
- Designer
- Tinker Hatfield
- Style code
- 87106
- Original colourway
- Sport Red · OG
- Upper
- Nylon mesh + suede
- Midsole
- EVA foam · visible Air unit
- Weight (US 9)
- ~310 g
- Drop
- 10 mm