Nike Rift 2 in Black and Metallic Silver Retros the 2002 Sequel, Not the 1996 Original

Nike brings the Rift 2 back to SNKRS on September 10 in Black and Metallic Silver, style code IQ8006-003, at $125. It is the second colorway to come off that style number since June, a faster cadence than this shoe has seen in twenty years. It also carries a detail the release feeds keep flattening. The shoe going on sale is not the 1996 Air Rift. It is the 2002 follow-up, and Nike’s own product copy says so.

The Air Rift arrived in 1996 as one of the strangest things Nike had ever put in a running catalog. A split toe, a strap where the lacing should be, and a build that came out of watching barefoot distance runners in Kenya. Nike’s own telling connects the name and the shape to the Great Rift Valley, with the toe split standing in for the fault line and letting the foot spread the way it does unshod. We went through that history in full when the Rift 2 returned in Black and Tm Dark Green in June, the pair everyone calls the Kenya even though Nike does not.

The Rift II is the part that goes missing. Nike updated the model in 2002, streamlined the upper, and kept the split toe and the full slip-on construction. It never became a permanent line item. It surfaced, disappeared, and spent most of two decades as a shoe people searched for rather than bought. Nike’s copy for this release calls it a one-for-one bring back, which is the brand stating outright that it is retroing the sequel and not the original. Almost nothing written about this shoe makes that distinction.

Black and Metallic Silver reads lighter than the name suggests. The bulk of the upper is a pale silvered grey, perforated across the side panel, with the black concentrated at the heel, the collar and the strap that runs across the instep. The midsole and the rear of the tooling are black, which gives the shoe a floating look in profile that the darker June pair did not have. Nike describes the upper as flexible with mesh underlays, the same construction language it used three months ago. The split toe is untouched. There are no laces anywhere on the shoe and the strap does all of the containment work. From above, the toe split is the first thing you see, which is the whole point and the reason the model has always divided people. The Rift reads either as an artifact of Nike’s most experimental decade or as a mistake, and there is very little ground between those two positions.

The timing is the interesting part. Nike is putting the Rift 2 and the Air Max Dolce on SNKRS on the same morning, both listed as women’s, both slip-on, both leaning silver. That is not an accident in a launch calendar Nike controls to the day. It reads as a deliberate push on laceless footwear at a moment when the market has spent two years rewarding chunky and technical over clean. It also says something about where Nike is willing to be strange. The First Sight program, the Rift, the Dolce, all of it is going out under a women’s label while the men’s September calendar runs on Air Jordan retros and Air Force 1 collaborations. That is either a vote of confidence in the women’s buyer or a way of capping the downside, depending on how generous you feel.

At $125 the Rift 2 holds exactly the price the June pair carried, which is worth noting in a year when Nike has been moving retro prices up. Inside the same week the Air Max Dolce lands at $170 on the same morning and the Vomero Premium at $230 the day after. The Rift is the cheapest thing Nike is putting through SNKRS in this stretch, and for a shoe with a full slip-on build and no lacing hardware at all, that tracks. The First Sight Noir came in at $125 in July, so this is the price band Nike has settled on for its odder women’s product.

The Nike Rift 2 in Black and Metallic Silver releases September 10 through SNKRS and nike.com, style code IQ8006-003, at $125, in women’s sizing. Nike is the only confirmed stockist at the time of writing. The pair can be tracked by style code on nike.com.

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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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