The Air Max Foamdome enters SNKRS on November 5, and the first thing to settle is what to call it. Nearly every release calendar carrying this boot has filed it under Eggplant. Nike has not used that word anywhere. The listing says Electro Purple and Black, and the distinction matters, because Eggplant belongs to a different shoe from a different decade and this site has already had to correct the feeds once on this exact pairing.
Two Nike ideas collide in this boot and both have dates attached. The Air Max Goadome arrived in 2000, by Nike’s own account, a leather sneakerboot on a lugged outsole with a visible Air unit in the midsole, and it became the default cold weather shoe for a generation with no interest in a hiking boot. The Foamposite shell is three years older, a 1997 manufacturing experiment in which liquid urethane went into a mold and came out as an upper with no panels and almost no seams. Nike married the two in 2008 in a shoe called the Air Foamdome, then brought that pairing back in 2016 in a purple makeup under style code 843749-500, which is the release the word Eggplant actually describes. When a low-top version of the idea surfaced this June, the feeds ran it as Nike combining two silhouettes for the first time, and we pointed out that the combination dated to 2008. What arrives now is the original format rather than the low-top, which makes it the closer descendant of the two.
The shell takes the lateral and medial panels and wraps the heel, rippled in the Foamposite relief and finished in a purple that reads nearly black at the toe and opens to violet across the midfoot. Everything the shell does not cover is black leather, which means the toe box, the eyelet row, the tongue and the collar, and the laces are flat black webbing. A single pale grey panel sits in the eyelet row on each shoe, the one break in an otherwise unbroken upper. The midsole carries a long visible Air window running from under the arch back through the heel, tinted purple, with a black Swoosh set into the foam beside it. The outsole is a deep lug pattern with purple showing through the black, and the purple carries up into the sidewall under the Air window rather than stopping at the foxing. Nike lists the upper as leather and synthetic leather over a foam midsole, with Max Air underfoot and a rubber outsole, which is the Goadome parts list with a shell dropped on top of it. The one piece of branding Nike’s listing never mentions is printed inside. The ACG triangle sits on the insole of both shoes, in purple, with the Swoosh inside the triangle and the lettering above it.
That last detail is worth a second look, because outlets covering this release have filed it as an ACG shoe and Nike’s own product title calls it the Air Max Foamdome with no sub-line attached. The insole is the only place the shoe itself takes a side. Nike has also been running the Goadome hard this autumn. The low top has had three outings here since September, in black and volt, in midnight navy and in a black croc emboss, and the thread running through all three was a boot getting steadily less like a boot. This is the correction. The full height collar is back, the lug depth is back, and the molded shell is doing what a shell on a boot is supposed to do, which is give the upper a surface with barely a seam in it. Nike sells the pairing on nostalgia and traction rather than on weather sealing, which is an honest place to put it. Foamposite creases where it bends and a boot asks the upper to bend at the flex point with every step, so the interesting thing to watch on this one is not how it looks in November but how it looks in March.
Nike has this at $265, which makes it the most expensive shoe on its own upcoming board. The Air Foamposite Pro “Mummy Duck” two days earlier asks $230, the Air Jordan 12 and Air Jordan 14 retros ask $215 each, and the Air Max Ecstasy Plus asks $180. The 2016 Foamdome was reported at $225 when it came back, so the boot has climbed about forty dollars across a decade, which is close to what every leather Nike has done over the same stretch. A boot carries a materials premium and a tooling premium at the same time, and a boot with a molded shell on it carries both of them twice.
The Nike Air Max Foamdome is style code IX7255-506 in Electro Purple and Black, releasing November 5 with the SNKRS entry window opening at 15:00 UTC, which is 8am Pacific and 11am Eastern. Retail is $265 and Nike has it limited to one pair per account. It launches at Nike.com and on SNKRS. Release calendars listing this pair as Eggplant are borrowing the name of the 2016 release rather than quoting Nike.
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