Nigo’s Air Force 1 World Tour has a second stop and it belongs to j-hope. Nike published official images on October 8 of a pair the two built together, a glossy Burnt Sunrise and Metallic Gold upper with Chlorine Blue trim and squirrel graphics running across the shoe and the box it comes in. It reaches Nigo’s own Human Made webstore on October 17 and the rest of the world five days after that. The heel is where the real argument is.
The Air Force 1 arrived in late 1982 as a basketball shoe designed by Bruce Kilgore, and it has spent the four decades since being handed to whoever had something to say. What matters for this program is which Air Force 1 Nigo is working on. When Nike opened the World Tour in April it said Nigo had worked with its designers to bring back the sleeker vintage look of the 2001 Air Force 1, a narrower toe box and a more athletic fit, and that the 2001 shape would carry through the entire journey rather than show up once and leave. That is a construction decision rather than a colorway, and it is what makes this a program instead of a run of collabs. Nike has spent this year quietly putting the same 2001 pattern back into the line, from a plain white inline pair in the summer to the College Grey and Pink Glaze this month. The Victor Victor collection was built on it too. Nigo got the version collectors had been asking Nike to use again.
Nike’s own description of this pair barely fills a sentence: glossy Burnt Sunrise and Metallic Gold leather, Chlorine Blue accents, j-hope’s squirrels. The photographs carry a good deal more. High-gloss Burnt Sunrise covers the toe and the heel against a metallic gold midpanel, and the swoosh is a matte brown that refuses to shine next to either one. The laces are thick rope cord in brown and cream. The collar lining and a thin pinstripe down the cream midsole are the Chlorine Blue, and the squirrel sits on the quarter panel, outlined in that same blue. The tongue label reads Nigo Air over Air Force 1 rather than Nike Air. Then the heels, stamped J-HOPE AIR on one shoe and NIGO AIR on the other. The box is printed with squirrels, acorns and pink stars. Nike calls the finish glossy leather, j-hope calls it enamel, and the photographs show a high shine either way.
“I really like the harmony of the enamel material color that Nigo expressed,” j-hope said of the pair. “And the special shoelace details that I haven’t seen often bring out the charm of the sneakers even more.”
In April the first stop on this tour was entirely Nigo’s own past. LO2 was the magazine column he and Jun Takahashi ran in the early 1990s, the Sail and Loyal Blue were matched to an original sign from their NOWHERE boutique in Ura-Harajuku, and the shoe launched at the Design Museum in London alongside an exhibition of his work. Six months later the second stop is a member of BTS and a squirrel. Nike said at the outset that the journey would draw on Nigo’s friends and his history, and this is what the friends half looks like, with the guest’s name stamped into one heel and Nigo’s into the other. Watch the order of operations too. The LO2 went to a museum and then to Nigo’s webstore and Undercover Aoyama, with no wide SNKRS release named at all. This one opens at humanmade.jp and goes global on SNKRS five days later. The tour is widening and Nigo’s own storefront still gets the first week of it.
Nike has not published a price for this pair, and it did not publish one for the LO2 in April either. Both went out as official images with a date attached and nothing else, which is a strange way to announce a shoe headed for SNKRS. What can be said is where the build sits. The Air Force 1 ’01 Nigo is working on lists at $150 on nike.com today, against $115 for the ’07, and NOCTA’s Air Force 1 Low is $160. A collaborator pair on the ’01 pattern with its own printed box would land at or above the top of that range. Until Nike says so, there is no figure here worth repeating.
The Nike x Nigo x j-hope Air Force 1 launches exclusively on October 17 at humanmade.jp, then globally on October 22 on SNKRS and at select retail locations. Nike has published no style code and no retail price. The newsroom page carrying these images also holds the full LO2 set, and Nike says further styles are coming from the same journey.
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