Jordan Brand’s Space Jam collection leads with five Air Jordan 11 designs, and the Air Jordan 3 Retro turns up further down the page with a single line of copy behind it. It deserves a longer look than the release gave it. Open the press frame and the two features the Air Jordan 3 introduced to this line, the ones every retro since has treated as untouchable, have been removed or handed to somebody else. The collection arrives November 5.
The Air Jordan 3 landed in 1988 as the first Jordan shoe Tinker Hatfield designed, and Nike’s own archive page credits him with crafting the elephant print that wrapped its toe and heel. That print was structural thinking, not decoration. The 1 and the 2 were tall, formal basketball shoes built on leather, and the 3 cut the collar down to the ankle, opened a visible Air window in the heel and used the printed panels to carry the shape where a taller shoe would have leaned on more hide. Nike ties the model to the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest, Jordan’s third, and to the moment the Jumpman arrived on a Jordan shoe. The original pair was white and cement grey under style code 4365. Nearly four decades of retros have treated those two marks, the print and the Jumpman, as the fixed points of the silhouette. Jordan Brand has built whole colorways around recoloring the elephant panels and changing nothing else.
This one changes both. The collar flap carries a pink embroidered Lola Bunny in the Jumpman’s exact pose, mid-leap with the legs split and one arm up holding the ball. A tan pom, a rabbit tail, hangs from a silver ball chain at the heel. The laces are royal blue flecked with pink, the lace loops are pink, and the eyelets are a sharp yellow. Pink stitching outlines the mudguard, the collar and the midsole stripe. The upper reads pale, somewhere between white and soft mint, though the shoot lights everything from a glowing green floor so the exact tone is not callable from this frame. The heel keeps its Air window. The toe and the heel wrap are smooth. There is no elephant print anywhere on the shoe. The second shoe in the frame sits further back and out of focus, so the lateral side, the outsole and the tongue label cannot be read from this image at all. Jordan Brand published no description of this pair beyond its name, so every detail above is read off the photograph rather than from the brand.
Space Jam has always meant the Air Jordan 11. That is the shoe in the movie, and the five Air Jordan 11 designs at the top of this collection are the brand working its actual inventory. Reaching for the 3 means reaching outside the story, and the reason the brand found is Lola Bunny, who gets the pose rather than a graphic print. That is a better idea than another character head stamped on a tongue. The harder question is the mudguard. On most silhouettes a smooth panel is a material choice. On the 3 it is the absence of the reason the model exists, on the shoe that introduced it, in a collection built on anniversaries. Read one way, Jordan Brand is treating its most quoted silhouette as a canvas instead of a relic. Read another, an Air Jordan 3 with no elephant print and no Jumpman is a 3 wearing somebody else’s clothes. There is also a commercial logic the brand will not say out loud. The Air Jordan 11 is a December shoe with a queue attached, and the 3 is the silhouette Jordan Brand can put into a November collection without disturbing that. Giving the 3 the character the movie’s marketing has leaned on hardest for thirty years is how you make a supporting release feel like a reason to show up.
Jordan Brand has not announced retail for the Air Jordan 3 Retro “Space Jam” and has not published a style code. For a sense of where it lands, the Air Jordan 3 “Fireside” that arrived October 3 was $205, and the Air Jordan 12 “Fireside” on October 24 is $215. The 3’s original 1988 retail was $100. A pair carrying custom embroidery, a hanging pom and specialty laces would normally land at the upper end of that band rather than the lower, though that is an expectation and not a figure the brand has given.
The Jordan Brand x Space Jam collection is available starting November 5 at jordan.com and select retailers. The brand has not broken out individual dates for the shoes inside it, so November 5 is the collection’s date and not a confirmed date for this pair. The footwear list also carries five Air Jordan 11 designs, including the Retro OG and the women’s “Magic Ball,” plus the Jordan First 1 “Space Jam,” the Air Jordan 1 Low SE “Magic Ball” and the Air Jordan 1 Low Golf Spike “Space Jam.” No style code and no price for the Air Jordan 3 Retro has been published.
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