Nike Air Force 1

The Nike Air Force 1 is a heavy leather basketball shoe on a thick, flat cupsole: a smooth upper with a Swoosh along each side, perforations across the toe, a padded collar and a small medallion threaded onto the bottom of the laces, stamped "AF-1" and "'82". It is made low, mid and high, and the one most often bought is the low-top in plain white, the colour in which it has become something like a uniform.

Bruce Kilgore, who had never designed a basketball shoe before, drew it in 1982. Players of the time padded their feet with several pairs of socks against hard courts; Kilgore took the lowered heel of a Nike hiking boot, the Approach, and put Nike's Air cushioning into a basketball shoe for the first time. Nike released it in late October 1982 as a high-top, named after the president's aircraft, and added a low-cut version that reached the shops widely the following year.

Nike did not intend to keep it. Its practice was to move on to the next technology, and the shoe was dropped in 1984. Three Baltimore shops kept asking for it, ordering exclusive colours that drew buyers up and down the East Coast, and Nike brought it back: its own archive puts the first of these monthly releases in late 1985, other accounts in 1986. The catalogue records the interval as a pause, since the same company resumed the same shoe after two years.

It has been made without interruption since, and it is Nike's best-selling shoe. In 1987 Kilgore visited a factory in Taiwan and was surprised to hear it was still in production. Since then it has appeared in more than seventeen hundred colourways and in Harlem acquired the name Uptowns, yet the shape on the shelf is the one Kilgore drew, without the side-panel stitching of the first pairs.