The Surprising History of the Air Jordan (2024)

Nike’s Air Jordan continues to dominate the trainer market. Last year sales passed $5bn (£4.4bn) for the first time, earning Michael Jordan, who retired in 2003, $150m (£121m) – almost double the $86.7m (£70m) he amassed during his entire NBA career. This week a pair of signed Jordan XXXIII’s went on sale at Sotheby’s. Worn during the 1998 season that forms the backdrop to Netflix’s hit 10-part 2020 documentary The Last Dance, they have a guide price of $2-$4m (£1.6m-£3.2m), meaning they should comfortably break the record for the most expensive trainers ever sold at auction.

Created for the then-unknown rookie, the Air Jordan 1 was launched on 1 April, 1985 and went on sale for $64.99. Nike expected to sell 100,000 pairs in its first year. Instead, it shipped 1.5m pairs in the first six weeks. “Nike’s expectation when we signed the deal was, at the end of year four, they hoped to sell $3m worth of Air Jordans,” Michael’s long-time agent Peter Falk says in The Last Dance. “In year one, we sold $26m.” Michael retired for the third and final time in April 2003, but Nike continues to release new Jordan models each year – it’s currently up to Air Jordan XXXVII, not counting hundreds of different colourways, collaborations, limited editions and reissues. There are more than 1,000 different Jordan 1s on the trainer resale site GOAT, making it the marketplace’s biggest shoe by volume. The Jordan Brand became its own Nike subsidiary in 1997, and now includes hoodies, tracksuits, baselayers, socks, bodysuits for babies and sports bras.

Though subsequent Jordans were created by Nike design wizard Tinker Hatfield – creator of the Air Max 1, the Air Huarache and the MAG, or ‘the Back to the Future shoe’ – the Air Jordan 1 was designed by a less well-known name. Peter Moore was part of a small group of Nike executives who began working with Michael Jordan shortly after he left the University of North Carolina and joined the Chicago Bulls. Moore designed the shoe with input from Michael, who specified something eye-catching and low, so he could feel the court beneath his feet. Moore also came with a pocket of compressed air in the sole to cushion impact. The New York Times called the new shoes ‘spacebootlike’.

‘The idea was to break the colour barrier in footwear,’ Moore wrote in his 1995 book Peter Moore: A Portfolio. ‘Prior to that, 99 per cent of shoes were white or black, so I decided to design a shoe that would really take colour well. And the colours were red, black and white.’ Moore didn’t pick them at random – they belonged to the Chicago Bulls franchise. Michael Jordan was less keen – he called them ‘the devil’s colours’ – unsuccessfully arguing for the blue of his college uniform.

Moore later joined Adidas, first as creative director then briefly as president. Though he hasn’t received the recognition of other trainer designers including Sergio Lozano (Nike’s Air Max 95), Steven Smith (Reebok’s InstaPump Fury; Adidas’s Yeezy Boost 700) and Tinker Hatfield, he is celebrated in Air, played with a goofy overenthusiasm by the actor Matthew Maher. By other accounts the real Moore was a quiet character with no love for the corporate environment, who ‘wielded an array of curses that could make a sailor blush’ (he was from a naval family). Moore also created the Nike Dunk, another 1985 launch that has undergone a resurgence lately, and designed the ‘Jumpman’ logo. Created in 1997 and adapted from a Life magazine photograph, the ‘Jumpman’ silhouette captures Jordan mid-flight, ball in his left hand. Today it is interchangeable with Nike’s ‘swoosh’ on hundreds of products, as well as being immortalised in Drake’s 2015 song ‘Jumpman’. Moore passed away in April last year, aged 78.

The Air Jordan 1 was not the first shoe created in the image of a basketball player. Converse’s Chuck Taylor All Star came out in 1917; Puma’s Clyde featured the signature of New York Knicks point guard Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier in 1973. But as Air makes plain, the Air Jordan 1 was revolutionary both for its striking looks and for the deal struck by the Jordan family – in signing with Nike rather than more successful rivals Converse or Adidas, Michael would receive points on each pair sold. That deal would change the way sports, and sports stars, were marketed around the world.

The origins of the Air Jordan name are disputed. “Nike had just come out with this new technology for their running shoes called air soles,” Falk says in The Last Dance. “And obviously Michael played in the air, so I said ‘I got it, we’re going to call it Air Jordan.’” Sonny Vaccaro, then a consultant for Nike, and the protagonist of Air, is almost completely absent from The Last Dance. In a move designed to expose ‘the lie’ of that series, as he put it, in November 2020 Vaccaro auctioned off a pair of black Air Jordan VIs that the player had given him as a thank-you after wearing them during the 1991 NBA Finals. In Air it’s Matt Damon’s Vaccaro who comes up with the name – though Falk (played by Chris Messina) later insists the idea is his, in a scene that’s played for laughs.

It's not the only point of contention surrounding the Air Jordan’s origins. Air follows the official Nike narrative that the black and red shoes violated the NBA’s dress code, which at the time required footwear to be 51 per cent white. Legend has it that the league levied a $5,000 fine against Michael each time he stepped onto the court in them, and that Nike paid the fine. Ahead of the Nike Jordan 1’s general release to the public in 1985 it launched a national advertising campaign that reinforced the shoes’ outlaw credentials. ‘On Oct.15, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On Oct. 18 the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, the NBA can’t keep you from wearing them. Air Jordan’s. From Nike’. Today, sneakerheads still refer to the Air Jordan 1 model as ‘Banned’.

In 2012, a trainer writer and Michael Jordan fan called Marvin Barias started to wonder about the Nike legend. Writing on the forum Sole Collector, he raised a question: did anyone have any pictures of Michael wearing the ‘Banned’ Jordan 1s during a NBA game? The photo everyone knew of Michael wearing black and red Jordans came from a 1985 slam dunk contest, somewhere NBA rules didn’t apply. Earlier photos from Madison Square Garden in 1984 seemed to show black and red leather high-tops with the words ‘Air Jordan’ across the back. But closer inspection revealed a different heel and tongue to Peter Moore’s designs. Those shoes were Air Ships, a different general-release product designed by Bruce Kilgore. The first Air Jordans weren’t worn on court until April 1985 – and came with a league-compliant percentage of white. In 2021, Sotheby’s sold ‘Michael Jordan’s Earliest Known Regular Season Nikes | Game Worn & Signed Air Ships’ for $1,472,000 (£1,190,097) – making them the most expensive trainers sold at auction. (They were almost immediately overtaken by Kanye West’s Nike Air Yeezy Grammy Prototype from 2008, that went for $1.8m (£1.46)).

Each new Jordan shoe has bought with it new innovations. The Nike Air bubble on the III, the reflective tongue on the V, the mesh upper on the XI. As per any collectors’ mentality, the updates worked because there was a focus on getting the next in the sequence – the newest, and latest, model. By the end of the 1990s, fashion shifted and hip-hop culture began embracing retro styles. With the classics cool again, Nike capitalised by reissuing the Jordan back catalogue in multiple iterations. Resale trainer sites like StockX and GOAT, as well as physical retailers like Kick Game, sprang up and began doing brisk business in the old models. Designers including Dior’s Kim Jones and Louis Vuitton’s Virgil Abloh ‘elevated’ the Air Jordan 1 into a big-ticket, high-fashion item. The Last Dance made the run of Jordans 1-XIII – the models worn by their namesake on the court – hotter than ever. Particularly the Air Jordan 1s. “For a kid, it was almost like owning a lightsaber from Star Wars,” the rapper Nas says in the documentary. “You needed that shoe to be like him. It was more than a status symbol – you know that this guy was the guy.”