Jordan Brand sent me an Air Jordan 41 in Ruby a few hours before I had to talk about it. I already wrote up what is in the shoe, so this is the other half. What it is like with the thing actually in your hands, and whether I would spend the $205.
Photographs are doing this shoe no favors
The upper is what Jordan Brand calls nano print mesh, a woven base with a raised print laid over it, and the crosshatch runs in two directions. On a product page it collapses into a single block of red. In your hands it does not sit still. Turn it under a lamp and the raised lines catch light at different angles, so the panels go from near-black to bright red as the shoe rotates. That is the whole point of the material and it is the one thing a photo cannot carry.
Same story with the laces. They read as flat red in every product shot. They have a reflective fleck woven through them that goes almost white when light hits it directly.
The eyelets are metal rivets set straight into the mesh rather than the moulded plastic loops most performance shoes use now. The tongue wordmark is debossed into the material instead of printed, tonal on this pair, so it only appears when the light is right.
The question I could not answer
Donald Kelsey, a senior director at Jordan Brand, told me the retro program has cast what he called a cloud over performance basketball, that it got too blurry. That is a Jordan Brand director saying the retro business has obscured the thing the brand is supposed to be for.
Then he asked me when a game shoe last surprised me. I did not have an answer. I have been doing this for twenty years and I could not name one.
They built a version and threw it away
There is a taller Air Jordan 41 that exists. A raised collar got built, people inside went to bat for it, and the question they kept returning to was whether it was doing anything or whether it was just in the way.
What settled it was two words from Michael Jordan. No gimmicks. If somebody puts it on and it feels like a distraction, that is a problem. So they killed it. One decision, and it tells you what the whole shoe is trying to be.
Flip it over
The outsole is full-length HART rubber with a diamond-shaped cutout and clear TPU across it. Through the window you can see fabric-wrapped foam, the edge of the carbon fiber shank and the Jumpman.
Windows in outsoles are not new. Doing one where what sits underneath is worth looking at is the harder part, and this clears it. It is my favourite thing about the shoe.
Where I push back
Jordan Brand stopped naming colorways after moments and started naming them after stones, then told you which moment each stone stands for. Ruby is the first of eight, and the rest are quartz, tiger’s eye, amethyst, jade, meteorite, pink diamond and opal. I like the rubies and I like the jades. It is still worth saying out loud that a naming system got replaced by a naming system.
Does he still care?
Based on my conversations, he is in the room at every checkpoint, gets a pair in his size to test, and calls afterward when he thinks of something. There is an Air unit in the heel because of what he said about defense, a shank running up the sidewall because of how he described cutting, and a collar in a bin because he said no gimmicks. Everyone I talked to described a competitiveness that has not cooled in his sixties. That is not somebody who has cashed out.
Would I spend $205?
That is real money and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you are playing, there are a lot of good decisions stacked into that price. They threw away a design that was not earning its place and they cut a hole in the bottom so you can see the engineering. That does not show up on a spec sheet and you can feel it in your hand.
I do not play enough basketball right now to justify it, and that is about my schedule rather than the shoe. Ruby is also not my colorway, I have too many black and red Chicago pairs already. Ask me again when the jade lands and I am back in the gym, because the honest answer is that it is tempting.
Jordan Brand provided the pair photographed for this post. Photos by Nick Engvall. The full conversation with Leo Chang, Donald Kelsey and Jason Mayden is on Sneaker History.
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