Nike Cortez

The Nike Cortez is a low running shoe of the early 1970s: a leather or nylon upper with a long Swoosh sweeping the full length of the side, a thick layered foam midsole with a contrasting stripe along it, and a herringbone tread underneath. The sole was the point. Bill Bowerman wanted a training shoe that would cushion the road for distance runners, and he put the foam where the foot struck hardest and raised the heel to ease the Achilles tendon.

The design began before Nike existed. Bowerman, the track coach at the University of Oregon, and Phil Knight, one of his former runners, had founded Blue Ribbon Sports to sell Onitsuka Tiger shoes in America, and Onitsuka sent them a prototype in 1967. It was to be the Aztec, for the Mexico City Olympics, until Adidas objected. Bowerman's answer was to name it after the conquistador who had defeated the Aztecs.

When the partnership with Onitsuka collapsed in 1972, both sides kept making the shoe. Blue Ribbon released its own Cortez, built by Japanese factories, under the new name of Nike; the Japanese company carried on with the same pattern and, after losing the name in court in 1974, called it the Corsair. Two makers sharing a design gives no single line to date, so the catalogue counts the Cortez from Nike's first year rather than from the Onitsuka shoe of 1968.

It became one of the shoes Nike was built on, and then a fixture of Los Angeles streets, where it is part of the Chicano wardrobe. Forrest Gump ran across America in a pair. Nike has made more than seven hundred versions; the current one has a wider toe and stiffer side panels, but the Swoosh, the striped foam and the herringbone sole are where Bowerman put them.