The KD19 Aunt Pearl Puts Kay Yow’s Name on the Insole, and Nike’s Copy Never Says It

Nike opens SNKRS entries for the KD19 “Aunt Pearl” on November 13, in a mottled pink the brand lists as Pink Foam, Stadium Green and Metallic Summit White. The sockliner under each heel carries two names set in a ring around Kevin Durant’s logo. One of them reads AUNT PEARL. The other reads KAY YOW. Nike’s product description for the shoe tells the first woman’s story and never arrives at the second, which is a strange omission on a shoe that has been raising money in her name since 2012.

Pearl Durant was the sister of Durant’s grandmother Barbara, and the two of them shared the house where Durant was looked after as a kid. She died of lung cancer in 2000, when he was twelve. Nike built the first shoe around her in May 2012, a pink makeup of the KD 4 released in partnership with the Kay Yow Cancer Fund, and the two tributes have travelled together ever since. Kay Yow coached women’s basketball at North Carolina State, took a United States team to an Olympic gold medal in 1988, and died on January 24, 2009 at 66, after three rounds with a breast cancer she had first been diagnosed with in 1987. She set the fund up with the V Foundation in December 2007, barely a year before she died, to pay for research into women’s cancers. So the series has always been two memorials stacked on one shoe, and the two women it honors did not die of the same disease.

The upper is the part that rewards a close look. What reads as flat pink from across a room is a jacquard with a pixelated pattern woven into it, blocks and broken diagonals in a deeper rose over a pale ground, closer to a degraded digital image than to anything floral. The midfoot and heel lockdown piece, the TPU blade Nike shapes into every KD19, arrives here in a high-gloss metallic pink rather than the matte finish it wears on the general releases. The KD logo on the tongue is a small raised plate in an iridescent silver that turns green under light, the only element on the shoe that is not pink. Underneath, the outsole is a translucent cream instead of white, with the 7 and 35 cuts Nike patterns into this model visible through it, and the midsole is tinted off-white rather than left bright. The names on the insole are printed in a deep rose that only becomes legible with the shoe off the foot.

What has changed over fourteen years is not the shoe, it is the copy around it. Nike’s own product description runs four bullet points on the Air Zoom Strobel unit, Cushlon 3.0 foam and the midfoot plate before it reaches a short paragraph headed Find a Cure, which tells the Aunt Pearl story in a few sentences and stops. Kay Yow is not in it. Neither is the fund, and neither is any statement about where the money goes. In 2012 the partnership was the announcement. Now it lives on a sockliner and is absent from the page, so a buyer who does not already know the history has no way to pick it up from Nike. That omission costs more here than it would on a graphic pack, because the entire argument for an Aunt Pearl release is that it is not a colorway. A shopper deciding between this and the Slim Reaper is being asked to pay the same money for the same tooling, and the only thing separating them is the story, which is the one asset Nike has chosen not to put on the page. Compare the N7 line, where the G.T. Cut 4 N7 puts its collaborator and its program in the product name itself.

Retail is $170, the same number the Slim Reaper colorway of this shoe carried a month earlier, and twenty dollars above the recent run of Aunt Pearls. The KD 17 released at $160 in 2024, and the KD 13 and KD 14 both landed at $160 before that. The line started at $95 on the KD 4 in 2012 and peaked at $200 on the KD 8 in 2016, so the ladder has never climbed in a straight line. At $170 this sits at the floor of Nike Basketball’s signature pricing this season rather than near the ceiling, which is the right address for a shoe meant to move volume for a cause. The Ja 4 High asks more.

The Nike KD19 “Aunt Pearl” is style code IO8111-600 in Pink Foam/Stadium Green/Metallic Summit White, and retail is $170 in a full men’s size run. SNKRS entries open on November 13 at 7 a.m. Pacific through the SNKRS app and nike.com. Nike Basketball accounts including Foot Locker typically follow on or shortly after the entry date, so check regional stockists if the draw does not land.

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The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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