The Air Force 1 Low Arrives Pre-Cracked, and Menta Is the Colorway That Earns It

The Air Force 1 Low arrives on October 1 in a mint green and off white makeup Nike is calling Menta, and the thing worth looking at is not the color. It is the surface. Nike has put a crackled finish into the leather, so the shoe ships already looking like it has been through a season. On most silhouettes that is a texture decision. On this one it is an argument with the shoe’s entire reason for existing.

The Air Force 1 arrived in 1982 out of Bruce Kilgore’s studio as a basketball shoe, and Nike’s own heritage copy still frames it that way, as the first basketball sneaker built around a Nike Air unit, carried from the hardwood to the blacktop. The qualifier in that sentence is load bearing. Nike had Air before 1982. What the Air Force 1 did first was put it under a basketball shoe. Everything after that is the part everyone knows. The model outlived its performance life almost immediately, got adopted in Baltimore and then everywhere else, and became the most durable product Nike sells. It is also the most replaceable one. A white Air Force 1 is a consumable. Nobody restores them, they buy the next pair, and an enormous amount of Nike’s business runs on exactly that rhythm. Which is what makes a version aged at the factory interesting rather than routine.

Menta is colorblocked rather than dipped. The toe, the mudguard and the forefoot panels are off white leather. The quarter panel, the eyestay, the collar and the heel are mint green, and the Swoosh is cut in the same off white as the toe, so the green sits as the ground and the white reads as the graphic rather than the other way around. The crackle runs across both. Up close the green panels look like a dried riverbed, a fine irregular network of splits in the surface rather than a repeating emboss, and the white panels carry a lighter version of the same treatment. Underneath, Nike commits further than it needed to. The midsole is white with AIR printed in green along the lateral side, and the outsole is green across the whole footprint, pivot circle included. Nike’s product copy for this pair runs to one sentence, and it names colorblocked leather, crackled textures and a vintage feel without ever saying what is supposed to have aged.

The pre-aged sneaker is not a new idea and it usually goes badly. Yellowed midsoles and scuffed toe boxes sold as finishes have been run across most of Nike’s archive, and the objection is always the same, that a manufactured patina tells a story about a shoe you did not wear. The Air Force 1 is the hardest possible case for it. There is no silhouette where newness is more of the point. A fresh pair is loud and clean and that is the whole transaction, which is why the white on white economy works the way it does. So cracking the leather at the factory is the most confrontational place Nike could have put this treatment, and doing it in mint green rather than white is what saves it. On a green panel the crackle reads as material, closer to a treated hide than to damage. Nike is releasing the same makeup in black and white on the same day, and that pair has a harder job to do. Both pairs run off the same base style code, JA0248, which marks this as one makeup in two colorways rather than two unrelated drops, so Nike is testing the crackle against a light shoe and a dark one on the same morning.

Retail is $140, and both colorways of this makeup carry it. The comparison worth making sits inside Nike’s own October calendar. The Paul Rodriguez Zoom Air Low landing twelve days later is a full suede skate shoe with an embossed heel panel and a cupsole built to absorb impact, and it lists at $125. So Nike is asking fifteen dollars more for a surface treatment on a forty-four year old basketball shoe than for construction on a shoe designed to be destroyed. That is not a mistake in Nike’s pricing. It is an accurate read of which of the two the market will pay for, and the Air Force 1 has been winning that argument since the eighties.

The Air Force 1 Low Menta and White releases October 1 in style code JA0248-001 at $140, through Nike SNKRS, where the launch page lists a 7:00 AM start. The Black and White version of the same makeup carries JA0248-300 and releases the same day at the same price. Neither launch page names a stockist beyond Nike’s own channel. For recent general release makeups on the same silhouette, see the College Grey and Pink Glaze and the Campfire Orange.

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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