There is a posh British alien named Greg hanging off the laces of this one. He is one of several characters Avery Wilson drew for her Doernbecher Freestyle shoe, which Nike built on an Air Jordan 11 Low IE, a 1996 silhouette Jordan Brand reaches for only every few years. Her design team then covered the upper with a removable shroud, so the drawings stay hidden until the wearer decides otherwise. The collection went to auction in Portland on October 16 and reaches SNKRS this winter.
The 11 Low IE is the stranger half of the Air Jordan 11‘s first year. Tinker Hatfield’s 11 had already given Michael Jordan his first low top since the Air Jordan II in 1986, and SneakerNews notes that the patent leather version of that low did not reach retail until 2001. The IE got there first by being a different shoe. Hatfield pulled the patent leather off the mudguard and put mesh and elephant print in its place, cutting weight and opening the upper up for warm weather, which made the 11 the first Air Jordan offered in two separate constructions at once.
SneakerFiles dates the Cobalt colorway to June 1, 1996 under style code 130270-101, in white, light grey and cobalt over a white midsole and a translucent outsole. What the IE initials stand for is still argued. SneakerNews has written it as International Edition. SneakerFiles reports that Nike confirmed International Exclusive, crediting designer Gentry Humphrey, in 2011. Neither source says the shoe was held back from the United States, and the 1996 Cobalt is listed as a general release, so the name is doing less work than it sounds like. Jordan Brand has returned to the mold sparingly, with Black Cement and Bred versions that Hypebeast dated to 2020 and 2021.
Avery’s version puts almost nothing where you would expect it. The base runs mint green and pink with yellow panels, iridescent sidewalls and a stretch of soft pony hair, and the elephant print the original wore on the mudguard has been redrawn as her own cartoon aliens. The shrouds came from her design team, built specifically to carry the sketches she produced in their first session together, which gives the shoe two completely different faces depending on whether they are on or off. That is a construction change rather than a graphic, and it is the rarer of the two things a Doernbecher shoe can do.
Greg, the green alien with the monocle, appears twice, as a plush hangtag and again as a square dubrae. The midsole runs a strip of her other characters, each one an alien that crash landed on Earth with a personality of its own. Neurospicy is embroidered across the collar in pink, a word Avery chose herself for her OCD and ADHD. A miniature Oregon license plate reading 143PPY sits in the lace cage, for her grandfather, nicknamed Poppy, and for the number of letters in I love you. The pairs ship with friendship bracelets whose beads she hand lettered.
Nobody in this business gets a brief like that. Doernbecher Freestyle has raised more than $49 million for OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital since 2004, all profit goes to the OHSU Foundation, and close to 370 Nike product creation staff have volunteered over the program’s life. The work runs nine months, starting from a patient questionnaire and moving through rounds of color and material review.
What that produces is a kind of design document the industry cannot buy. A collaboration usually starts with an audience and reasons backward to a product. This one starts with a teenager’s sketchbook and then goes looking for a silhouette that can hold it, which is how a mold Jordan Brand dusts off once every few years ends up carrying somebody’s cartoon aliens. Nike says all six shoes in this class are program debuts, so the Low IE is not even the only archive pull in the room. The companion Air Max 1/97 in the same collection is the other one.
No retail price has been announced for the Doernbecher Freestyle 22 collection, and the first pairs went to auction rather than to a shelf, so there is no figure to set it against. The only price attached to this silhouette with any authority is its original one, and SneakerFiles has the 1996 Cobalt Low IE at $115 as a general release. The Air Jordan 11 Magic Ball is carried at $235 in Nike’s own product feed, which is roughly where the line sits thirty years on. Doernbecher has never priced against that market, because the money leaves the company.
The Doernbecher Freestyle 22 collection was auctioned in Portland on October 16. Nike says it launches in the United States on SNKRS and at select US retail locations this winter, with no date narrower than the season. No style code and no retail price have been published for Avery’s Air Jordan 11 Low IE. The rest of the class runs a Nike Air Max 1/97, a Structure Plus, an Air Force 1 Mid, an ACG Rufus and a GT Future.
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