Caitlin Clark put a triple black Caitlin 1 on her own Instagram Stories on September 16, which is how the first colorway beyond the launch pair got announced. Style code IH7423-001, reported for January 5. That is the real news attached to a black Caitlin 1, and it is worth separating from the other story this shoe has been carrying since June, when a run of posts said Travis Scott had been seen wearing one. Nobody has produced the picture.
Nike built the first women’s signature basketball shoe around Sheryl Swoopes in 1995, the Air Swoopes, designed by Marni Gerber. Lisa Leslie and Dawn Staley got theirs before the decade was out, the Air Total 9 and the Air Zoom S5. Then the category went quiet for a very long stretch. Sabrina Ionescu’s Sabrina 1 restarted it in 2023, A’ja Wilson’s A’One followed, and the Caitlin 1 makes three live Nike women’s signature lines running at once, which has not been true since the nineties. Nike unveiled the collection on September 14 and puts it out September 24 in China and October 1 everywhere else. The shoe is credited to product line manager Alex Zerzan and footwear product design director Ben Nethongkome, with Clark named as a working collaborator rather than a signature on the box. Two colorways lead it, as covered in our look at the Caitlin Blue pair: IH7423-400, which Nike’s own technical string calls Racer Blue and Multi-Color, and Warning Code in Yellow Zest under IH7423-700.
The black pair is IH7423-001, and it is the first colorway Nike did not put in the launch presentation. It surfaced through Clark’s Stories rather than through a Nike release, and as of now there is no about.nike.com post and no live product page behind it. Sneaker Bar Detroit reported it at $140 for January 5, 2027. Both of those should be read as reported rather than confirmed until Nike puts up a page. Reporting describes the launch shoe’s tooling in a single dark colorway rather than a different build, which is the standard second move on a debut signature: get the shoe out in the color that people who do not follow the sport will actually buy. A triple black basketball shoe is a lifestyle sale more than a performance one, and scheduling it for the first week of January puts it past the holiday window and into the flat part of the year, where a plain colorway does its best work.
The Travis Scott story is the part that needs correcting in the open, because this page carried it. In June a run of outlets reported that Scott had been seen in an all-black Caitlin 1 before the line released, each of them pointing at a social media reveal from Clark that none of them linked. There is no photograph and no clip anywhere in that chain. One outlet illustrated the story with a wire photo of Scott courtside at an NBA game in February, which is neither the shoe nor the event. It should not have run as a sighting. That matters past the bookkeeping, because the point of attaching Scott to a rookie’s signature shoe is to borrow an audience, and the borrowing works whether or not the sighting happened. Clark does not need the loan. She holds the NCAA Division I scoring record, set March 3, 2024 against Ohio State, and she was the first pick of the 2024 WNBA Draft and that season’s Rookie of the Year.
The Caitlin 1 is $140 in North America and $135 in select markets abroad, and the black pair is reported at that same $140. Nike has held the whole line at one number so far, including the kids’ sizes, which carry their own codes rather than their own tier. The figure that gives $140 its context is not another shoe. Clark’s Nike contract was reported at $28 million across eight years when she signed in April 2024, described at the time as the largest sponsorship ever given to a women’s basketball player. Against an investment made that aggressively, a $140 signature shoe is Nike pricing the product conservatively, which is the same call it made on the October launch pair.
Release details: Caitlin 1 3x Black, style code IH7423-001, reported at $140 for January 5, 2027, with no Nike product page live yet. The launch colorways come first, Caitlin Blue under IH7423-400 and Warning Code under IH7423-700 at $140, September 24 in China and October 1 globally, with big kids at IQ2350-400 and little kids at IU7479-400.
Where to buy: Nike.com and the SNKRS launch calendar, where the January colorway should appear closer to the date.
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Source: Complex
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