Air Force 1 ’01 College Grey and Pink Glaze Is Nike’s Rat Shoe, and Nike Never Says Rat

Nike‘s own product copy for this Air Force 1 describes the design as an homage to “the non-human commuters scurrying through the subway tunnels on their own daily transit.” That is a lot of words to avoid one. Every shop listing, every first-look post and every group chat since the first images surfaced has called it the Subway Rat. The shoe reaches SNKRS on October 7 in College Grey and Pink Glaze, and the gap between what Nike wrote and what everyone else says is the most interesting thing about it.

The Air Force 1 arrived in 1982 out of Bruce Kilgore’s work, and Nike still describes it as the first basketball sneaker to house Nike Air. That framing matters, because the shoe gets miscredited constantly as the first Nike built around Air cushioning, which it was not. What it did do was move a performance idea from the hardwood to the blacktop and then out of basketball entirely. The ’01 is a separate argument inside the same silhouette. It is the 2001-era make-up, and Nike leans on the phrase gold standard when it describes it: a slimmer toe box, a thicker leather upper, proportions that read closer to what people remember than the current general release does. Nike has been feeding the ’01 back into the line steadily this year, from the plain white reissue in July to the built to order NYC program. This is the version of the shoe Nike reaches for when it wants the make-up to carry weight on its own.

The execution here is grey hairy suede across the whole upper, shaggy enough that the top down view reads as fur rather than nap. The outsole is pink. So are the small details at the heel and the eyelets, and the midsole carries a pink wash rather than the usual white. Set against the grey it lands somewhere between a tail and a tongue, and that ambiguity is clearly the point. There is no cartoon on the tongue, no printed graphic, no story card stitched into the collar. The whole reference lives in two materials and one color pairing, which is a restrained way to build a shoe around an animal most people flinch at. It is also why the euphemism in the copy works. Nike gave itself a design that can be read either way depending on whether you already know. It is also a smarter use of hairy suede than the material usually gets. Most brands reach for it when they want a shoe to look expensive, and the nap ends up doing nothing except catching light. Here the texture is the entire idea, and the pink outsole is what turns a grey shoe into a specific grey thing. Strip either one out and the release has nothing to say. That is rarer than it should be on a silhouette that moves forty colorways a season on nothing more than a new leather tone.

What matters about this release is not that Nike made a rat shoe. It is that Nike made it as a general release and declined to say the word. New York vermin have been sneaker subject matter for two decades, going back to Jeff Staple’s Nike SB Dunk Low “Pigeon” in 2005, but that shoe came from a shop owner working a tiny run out of a Lower East Side storefront, and the brand was content to let someone else carry the joke. This one is Nike doing it directly, at scale, on its most recognizable silhouette, and then writing around the punchline in the product description. That is a brand wanting the culture credit without the headline. Whether the reticence is caution about how a rat reads on a shelf in forty countries or just Nike being Nike about naming, the market has already settled it. The pairs will sell under a name Nike did not choose.

Retail is $150, which puts it $20 above the ’01 Triple White that came through in July at $130 and $25 above a standard Air Force 1 Low general release. Hairy suede is a real cost over leather and the ’01 tooling carries its own premium, so the number is defensible rather than opportunistic. It is also the rough ceiling for a non-collaborative Air Force 1 right now, which is the more useful read: Nike is charging collaboration-adjacent money for an in-house idea and betting the idea is strong enough to carry it.

The Nike Air Force 1 ’01 College Grey and Pink Glaze releases October 7 at 7 AM on SNKRS and nike.com, style code IV6999-001, at $150. Select Nike Sportswear accounts should have it the same day, and searching by style code will find it faster than the colorway name, since most listings file it under the nickname instead.

Written by

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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