Nike SB Air Force 1 “Flax” and the Reason Half the Internet Calls It Wheat

Half the coverage of this shoe calls it Wheat and Nike calls it Flax, and the disagreement has a real, datable answer sitting inside Nike’s own product data. The Nike SB Air Force 1 Low released in June in a colorway Nike lists as Flax and Black over a gum light brown sole, style code HM8517-200, at $120. This post shipped with an empty price field and a single release date, and both have been corrected. The shoe is also long past release, which the old copy did not read like.

The Air Force 1 came out in late October 1982, designed by Bruce Kilgore, and Nike’s own archive traces its lowered heel back to a hiking boot called the Approach, where the shape existed to take pressure off the Achilles. It was the first basketball shoe with a Nike Air unit, and Nike’s original marketing claimed 30 percent better shock cushioning than a standard shoe. What is worth flagging is what cannot be sourced. The line that skaters have always skated Air Force 1s is repeated constantly, and Nike’s newsroom, Nike’s history page and Nike SB’s own vault all say nothing about it. It may well be true. It is not documented, so this post does not assert it.

What Nike SB actually did is a rebuild rather than a colorway program on an existing shoe. The Nike SB Air Force 1 arrived in April, at skate shops on April 17 and on SNKRS on April 21, in Light Orewood Brown. Nike lists the changes specifically: an Air unit in the heel for impact, a reduced midsole height for board feel, a modified herringbone tread, a reinforced and padded tongue, internal straps, fit pods in the collar lining, a revised toe profile and stitch-turned seams. Mau Rosillo of Nike Color Design framed the job as balancing what skateboarders need against not wrecking an icon. So this sits in the same relationship to a standard Air Force 1 that an SB Dunk does to a Dunk. The Flax version puts premium suede on that build, with mesh at the tongue and lining and leather at the SB Air heel tab.

Now the naming. Flax is Nike’s word, not a nickname. Nike’s full colorway string reads Flax, Flax, Black, Gum Light Brown, and Nike’s product copy describes a premium suede upper in Flax. Wheat is what the media calls it, and Sneaker Bar Detroit runs the contradiction inside a single article, headlining Wheat while printing Flax in the colorway line. The reason is that Nike changed its own vocabulary. In 2013 the Air Force 1 Low Waterproof, style 309652-721, carried the official Nike string Wheat, Baroque Brown, Net. From 2019 forward the string is Flax: on CJ9179-200 in 2019, on the Supreme collaboration DN1555-200 in 2021, and now on HM8517-200. Nike stopped saying wheat somewhere between 2013 and 2019 and the press never followed.

The better frame for this release is not that the wheat Air Force 1 finally came to skate. Nike SB has run this color for twenty years, and its own vault dates the first one to December 2006 on the Dunk Mid Pro, described there in workwear terms, built with nubuck, a suede toe cap and an ostrich leather heel. Read that way, the Flax Air Force 1 is Nike SB’s own tradition landing on the silhouette last rather than the Air Force 1 lending a color to skateboarding. That reading is available from Nike’s own pages and almost nobody is writing it.

Retail was $120, which fills a field this post previously left empty. Two figures floating around are wrong and worth naming. Nike’s Australian SNKRS page shows $200, which is Australian dollars on an Australian storefront rather than a US price, and at least one aggregator lists $150. Neither is the US retail. On the secondary market the shoe is soft. Last sale on StockX sits near $104 against a three-month average of $93 and 452 sales, so roughly 13 percent under retail on healthy volume. The Light Orewood Brown pair from April averages about $122 on 569 sales, a little under its own retail. For contrast, the Supreme Air Force 1 in the same color family, DN1555-200 at $150, averages around $200. The premium in this lineage comes from a collaboration or from age, not from the color.

That gap is the honest read on the model. Nike’s press release introducing the Nike SB Air Force 1 called it a grail skate shoe, and both of its first-year colorways are trading at or below retail on roughly 500 sales a quarter. Selling well and appreciating not at all are different things, and this one is doing the first.

The Nike SB Air Force 1 Low in Flax and Black is style code HM8517-200 at $120. It landed at select skate shops on June 5 and on SNKRS on June 9, and this post previously carried only the SNKRS date. Skate shops getting it first is the normal order for a Nike SB release rather than a detail worth burying. SNKRS has delisted it since it sold through, so the live routes now are a Nike search on the style code, skate shops such as No-Comply, and StockX. The Campfire Orange Air Force 1 is the closest thing on the site in the same tonal register.

Source: Sole Retriever

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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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