The Dunk is the clearest case study in sneaker culture for how a boom actually ends.

It arrived for the 1985-86 college basketball season under Nike’s College Colors Program, remembered now by its campaign line, Be True to Your School. It was not really a new design. Nike blended shoes it already had, the 1984 Legend, the 1985 Terminator and the 1985 Jordan 1, into one cheap two-tone upper. There was no cushioning story. There was a school’s colors, and that was the whole idea.

Skaters found it the same way they found the Air Jordan 1, because it was flat, supportive and cheap. Nike made that official in the early 2000s with the Dunk Low Pro SB, re-engineered for skating with a fatter tongue and more padding. The Dunk then spent roughly fifteen years as a specialist shoe with a devoted audience and very little mainstream pull.

Then 2020 happened. The Dunk became the retail engine of the entire boom, the shoe that taught a generation of new buyers what a raffle was, and Nike produced it at a volume that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. And that is exactly what ended it. Scarcity was the product, and the supply eventually answered the question honestly.

The Dunk today sits on shelves, which is not a failure so much as a return to what it was for most of its life. That makes it a better shoe to buy and a worse shoe to flip, and it makes the interesting releases genuinely interesting again, because they are no longer competing with forty near-identical general releases a month.

This page tracks every Dunk Low we cover, SB and general release together, with release dates, retail prices, style codes, and where to buy. The notes say plainly when something is a general release, because that is the information the resale market works hardest to blur.

By Nick Engvall, founder of becausesneakers and Sneaker History.