The Air Force 1 Mid GORE-TEX Vibram Finally Gives the Ankle Strap a Job

Nike has dated the Air Force 1 Mid ’07 GORE-TEX Vibram for October 20, which puts it on shelves twelve days ahead of the low-top version of the same idea. When that Low was covered here earlier in October, the Mid existed as two leaked style codes with a vague fall window attached and nothing else. It now has a date, a men’s size run and a finished set of product photography, and the photography is where the argument is. Somebody finally gave the ankle strap a reason to exist.

The Air Force 1 arrived in 1982 as the first Nike basketball shoe built around an Air Sole unit, a Bruce Kilgore design that started life as a high top with an ankle strap. The strap was sold as support, back when ankle collars were the whole conversation in basketball footwear. The Low that followed dropped it. The Mid kept it and cut the collar down, which left the strap as the one piece of the original high top still hanging around on a shoe that had stopped needing it. That is roughly where the Mid has sat ever since. The Low is the volume shoe and the one that carries every collaboration worth queuing for. The High is the heritage piece. The Mid is the height people buy when they want a little more shoe, and its strap is a styling leftover that gets pressed flat and forgotten about on the walk out of the store. It has rarely had to do anything.

Nike lists the upper as full-grain leather with a waterproof GORE-TEX finish and a Vibram outsole underneath it. The photographs fill in what the spec sheet leaves out. The upper is a warm stone nubuck rather than the bright white that Summit White suggests, and the Swoosh is a black tumbled leather with the grain plainly visible in it. A small black label carrying a gold GORE-TEX wordmark sits at the midfoot, and a second gold wordmark, Vibram’s, runs along the black midsole beside a debossed AIR. The strap is the piece that changed. It now runs through a squared metal buckle stamped AIR FORCE 1, sitting above the hook-and-loop closure Nike still lists in the spec, which turns an adjustment nobody ever made into one that can be set and left. Turn the shoe over and the Blue Tint in the colorway name finally turns up. The outsole is a pale translucent icy grey, and Vibram has drawn its own tread across it without deleting the Air Force 1’s pivot circles. They are still there, redrawn in Vibram’s pattern rather than replaced by it. Smaller things hold: a lace keeper rides the lower eyelet, the tongue carries the usual NIKE AIR block in black on stone, and the perforation field across the toe is punched through leather rather than printed on it.

Two heights and four colorways between them is not a one-off. Nike has the Low in two makeups and the Mid in two, and sending the Mid out first says the brand believes the taller shoe is the one that sells a waterproof Air Force 1 in October. That is a fair read of the category. Nobody buying a leather sneaker with a membrane in it for a Northeast November is buying it to look technical. It also fits a wider pattern this season. Nike has run GORE-TEX through the Dunk Low and the Pegasus 42 inside the same window, with the membrane solved differently each time, bonded into the mesh on the runner and finished into the leather here. Waterproofing has stopped reading as a stunt at Nike and started looking like a program with a calendar behind it. The Mid is the clearest statement of it so far, because the strap and the collar are the only reasons to choose this height, and both of them finally point in the same direction as the sole.

The Mid lists at $180. A standard Air Force 1 Mid ’07 is $125 on Nike’s own site, so the membrane and the Vibram sole are adding $55 to the shoe. Run the same arithmetic on the Low and it does not come out the same. The GORE-TEX Vibram Low is $150 against $115 for a standard Air Force 1 ’07, a $35 premium for what reads on paper as identical technology on a shorter upper. Nike is asking $20 more to waterproof the taller shoe. For the rest of the board, the Dunk Low GORE-TEX is $155 and the Pegasus 42 GORE-TEX is $165, which leaves this Mid as the most expensive GORE-TEX pair on the Nike fall calendar covered here.

The Nike Air Force 1 Mid ’07 GORE-TEX Vibram in Summit White, Blue Tint and Black releases October 20 under style code IO1875-100 at $180 in men’s sizing, at Nike.com and Foot Locker. A second colorway, IO1875-001 in black, has turned up in advance coverage, but Nike has not put a date or a price on it. The GORE-TEX Vibram Low follows on November 1.

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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