air jordan 1

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Founder and History of air Jordan 1

The Air Jordan 1 High debuted in 1985 as the first signature sneaker developed by Nike for Michael Jordan. The Peter Moore designed performance basketball sneaker featured a simple Nike Dunk inspired design that incorporated the Nike Swoosh and the Jordan Wings logo and featured Nike Air. The black and red colorway of the Air Jordan 1 High was famously banned by the NBA for not adhering to the dress code. The Air Jordan 1 High was first retroed in 1994 and has seen hundreds of retro releases since

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The Air Jordan 1 is many things at once: It’s the first signature shoe for the greatest basketball player ever, the sneaker that changed collecting forever, and a classic that evokes nostalgia and connects generations. It’s also the most popular sneaker of today, with hundreds of different versions produced in the past decade. This week, with all things Michael Jordan returning to the public consciousness thanks to The Last Dance, The Ringer will explore the AJ1’s history, the resale market it still dominates, and how Nike and Jordan Brand are positioning the model for the future.

There’sThere’s a story behind virtually every pair of Air Jordan 1s. The classic Bred colorway represents a young player becoming a national sensation; they’re the big bang for Michael Jordan as a marketing icon and much of what’s come to be known as “sneaker culture.” The Shattered Backboards are modeled after the uniform he wore during a 1985 Italian exhibition game when he, well, shattered the backboard. The Barons are a reminder that the greatest basketball player on earth once took a year off to ride the bus in the minor leagues. The Lettermans are a tongue-in-cheek nod to the colors of the tracksuit a young Michael wore when he told the late-night host that he thought the Breds were ugly.

The story of the shoe’s first retro pack is one of abandonment.

In 1994, with a freshly retired Michael Jordan beginning a new career in the White Sox farm system, Nike did something it would do hundreds of times to much fanfare over the ensuing 25 years: re-release pairs of Air Jordans that had long been out of production. The first time the company did it, though, not many people seemed to care. To mark the 10th anniversary of its flagship shoe, Nike dropped pairs of the famous Bred and Chicago colorways, making them available to the public for the first time since they fell out of production in 1986.

Maybe the $80 price tag was too much for an old shoe when new ones didn’t cost much more at the time. Maybe it was the fact that Jordan was off playing baseball. Maybe it was the plethora of other sneaker options on the market, including MJ’s latest, the Air Jordan 10. The shoes sat on shelves. Retailers began slashing the price, until they reached $19.99. And then, as Kenneth Myers Jr. recalls, they hit stores not known for carrying coveted kicks.

“I wouldn’t even say they were outlet-bound,” says Myers Jr., a 25-year AJ1 aficionado who runs the Instagram account mr_unloved1s and traces his love of sneakers to those 1994 retros. “Sears, JCPenney, depending on where you lived at, was where you were going to find them.”

Michael Jordan competes in the NBA All Star Slam Dunk Competition
Michael Jordan during the 1985 slam dunk competition in Indianapolis, Indiana Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images
The story is unthinkable today, when the same retros that were once discounted to $19.99 sell for 100 times that amount and the AJ1s are more important than ever for Jordan Brand, which became its own subsidiary under the Nike umbrella in 1997. In November, the brand posted its first billion-dollar quarter, led by the sales of two shoes: its newest from the signature line, the Air Jordan 34, and the original Jordan 1, which saw at least 80 different versions released in 2019. (For perspective, the second-most-released retro in 2019, the Jordan 4, had 18 drops.) Demand for the classic silhouette is at an all-time high, surpassing even what it was when the shoe disrupted the sneaker industry 35 years ago. And with The Last Dance reigniting hype for basketball’s favorite son, demand may only increase.

“It’s very difficult to separate Michael’s world from the footwear world that we are a part of,” says Jordan Brand vice president Gentry Humphrey. “They’re really, really synonymous.”

The Jordan 1 is back at the head of the sneaker table, with a new edition announced seemingly daily, and versions ranging from general-release everyman kicks to high-end luxury items like the planned Dior AJ1 that are rumored to cost $2,000. But how exactly did a 35-year-old model become the most desired sneaker in the game? It turns out that much like with the renewed hype for Michael Jordan himself, it’s not just about recognizing greatness; it’s about finding new ways to tell the stories that build the myth.

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TheThe basketball rolls toward the man, who’s standing alone on a playground court. When it reaches him, he flips it up with his foot like a soccer ball, catches it and dribbles between his legs in one motion, and begins sprinting. The camera switches to slow motion as the sound of jet engines fades in. Within seconds, he’s in the air with his left arm outstretched, and he’s reached cruising altitude. In the next frame, we’re looking upward toward the sky as he slams the ball through the rim. “Who says man was not meant to fly?” he asks in a voice-over that plays with just clouds on the screen, as if speaking straight from the heavens.

This was how Nike introduced the story of Michael Jordan to the six cities in which it debuted his signature shoe in April 1985. On its own, the campaign wasn’t groundbreaking—Jordan wasn’t the first athlete or even basketball player to receive his own sneaker, and Nike had already developed a reputation for its ads—but considering the stakes involved and what would follow, it proved to be downright revolutionary.

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In 1984, the company was in desperate need of a success story. Nike was ceding market ground to Reebok, which had exploded past its competitor as sales of trainers eclipsed running shoes. The situation was so grim that chairman and CEO Phil Knight opened his annual letter to shareholders with a dystopian outlook on Nike’s predicament: “Orwell was right: 1984 was a tough year.” There was one bright spot, however: That summer, Nike inked a rookie Michael Jordan to the most lucrative sneaker deal in history. It was a risk. The five-year, $2.5 million contract included an out for the company if the unproven player failed to hit certain performance markers—he had to win Rookie of the Year, become an All-Star, or average 20 points per game within his first three years—but it had the chance to pay off exponentially. Nike just needed a product worthy of that investment.

What lead designer Peter Moore came up with achieved that and then some. The first-ever Air Jordan is a stunning piece of footwear. It’s high-cut and made of premium leather, and unlike most basketball shoes of the era, its individual pieces allow for unique color blocking—something typically only running shoes provided at the time. The swoosh is displayed prominently, and toward the top sits the now-famous original Air Jordan logo, which Moore reportedly modeled after a set of plastic pilot wings. The shoes looked at once timeless and like they were sent from the future; The New York Times called them “spacebootlike” in 1986.

Before the Jordans, signature shoes had been made for NBA icons like Walt Frazier and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but never had one been designed with so much intent, says Elizabeth Semmelhack, the creative director of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and author of two books on sneaker culture. MJ’s then agent, David Falk, and Nike vice president Rob Strasser had asked for a shoe that held appeal beyond the basketball court. Moore’s creation delivered. “Obviously it needed to perform well for Michael Jordan, but I think that it was designed with an eye towards fashion or aesthetics in a way a lot of other sneakers were not,” Semmelhack says.

“Air Jordan was such an over-the-top thing, and if that had failed, you’re looking at an entirely different sneaker universe right now.” —Russ Bengtson
Russ Bengtson, a former Complex editor who was 14 when the AJ1 debuted, remembers the hype distinctly. Michael was the most exciting player to enter the league in years—an instant All-Star with a gravity-defying, flashy style who was helping the league go global at a time when that wasn’t so easy to do. Bengtson just can’t recall whether he was aware of the player or the footwear first.

“Did I know who Michael Jordan was before Air Jordan, or was it the other way around? It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” says Bengtson, who is still covering MJ on the After the Last Dance podcast.

Nike had expected to sell only 100,000 pairs of the $65 shoe in the first year. Instead, it shipped 1.5 million in the first six weeks. “Air Jordan was such an over-the-top thing, and if that had failed, you’re looking at an entirely different sneaker universe right now,” Bengtson says. But the gambit paid off: The AJ1s set a new standard for sneaker fashion and even found an alternative life as a skate shoe a few years after its debut. Knight opened his first shareholder letter after the Jordans had been out for a full year on an entirely different note: “The company has been in business 22 years, and 1986 was the best year we ever had.” The design and MJ’s on-court success had fed into the story and created an icon. It looked as if man was indeed meant to fly.

Nike has always had a knack for telling stories, and it found the perfect one with the most famous commercial for the first Air Jordan, which debuted not long after the “Meant to Fly” spot. It just took a bit of fiction to get there.

The broad strokes are familiar to anyone with passing interest in sneakers: In February 1985, a month and a half before the AJ1s would go on sale to the public, the NBA sent a letter to Nike that said MJ would be prohibited from wearing the new black and red shoes he had previously worn because they violated the league’s dress code, which at the time required footwear to be at least 51 percent white. Nike seized on the opportunity: Ahead of the shoe’s official release, the company debuted a national ad that hinted that the forbidden shoes perhaps offered a competitive advantage: “The NBA threw them out of the game,” the gravel-voiced announcer says as the camera pans down Michael’s long, sleek legs to reveal a pair of what’s commonly referred to as the Breds. “Fortunately, the NBA can’t stop you from wearing them.”

The legend says that the league levied a $5,000 fine against Michael each time he stepped onto the court in them, and that Nike was all too happy to pay it and drum up free publicity, even with the shoe also debuting in more traditional colorways. What could’ve been disastrous for a flagship product appeared to become an asset.

“It connected both this phenomenal player with these eye-catching shoes, and it spoke to ideas of American exceptionalism,” Semmelhack says. “Here’s a man who’s not only amazing because of all the hard work he does, but he also does it in his own way.”

But it turns out the story isn’t so cut and dry.

In 2012, Marvin Barias was browsing the forum on the sneaker-news website Sole Collector when he raised a question: Did anyone have pictures of Michael Jordan wearing the Banned AJ1s in an NBA game? Everyone had seen the famous photo of him in the 1985 slam dunk contest, when the NBA uniform rules didn’t apply and he sported the Breds and a gold chain. But no one could produce anything of him wearing them in a regular-season game.

“People were saying, ‘He got fined $5,000 a game every time he wore the shoe,’” says Barias, who runs the Instagram account mjo23dan and has written about the shoe and sneaker culture for Sole Collector. “So I thought it would be a simple thing to ask, like, ‘Well, is there any picture of him wearing the black and red shoe that people are supposedly saying is banned?’”

Barias turned up photos from 1985 of MJ wearing the famous Chicago colorway—which, unlike the Breds, contained enough white to meet the NBA’s uniform requirements—but the purportedly offending Breds were nowhere to be seen. Barias began digging through grainy newspaper images and YouTube clips, enlisted the help of other sneaker obsessives, and tracked all mentions of a young Michael’s footwear through interviews and other articles. But still, nothing—until he went back to the Bulls’ preseason games.

At first glance at the black and white photo, the shoes Jordan wore in his Madison Square Garden debut on October 18, 1984, could be mistaken for the infamous AJ1s: They’re black and red leather high-tops with the words “Air Jordan” emblazoned on the back. But closer inspection reveals something else: the tongue and toe box don’t belong to the AJ1, and the collar and heel lack the distinctiveness of Peter Moore’s design. These were the shoes the NBA referenced in its 41-word note to Nike. They were also an entirely different model: the Air Ships, a general-release sneaker that got a soft push in company ads. Michael even continued to wear them throughout his rookie campaign until the real Air Jordans were ready for the court in April ’85, albeit in league-compliant colors.

“It spoke to ideas of American exceptionalism. Here’s a man who’s not only amazing because of all the hard work he does, but he also does it in his own way.” —Elizabeth Semmelhack
“You see the Air Jordan 1, and it’s a shoe that has gained notoriety over the years,” Barias says. “But the Air Ship was before the Jordan 1. That’s the shoe that Jordan was wearing.”

Barias, who detailed his findings in a 2016 Sole Collector article, started a Change.org petition the same year asking Nike to retro the Air Ship. But despite increasing buzz and the demand, the company didn’t acknowledge the Air Ship aside from one cryptic tweet in 2014. That finally changed in late 2019, when Jordan Brand announced the “New Beginnings” pack. The February 2020 release included two pairs of sneakers: a set of Air Jordan 1s and the red and white Air Ships. For Barias, pairing the two models was the best possible option for the Air Ship gaining public awareness. “If you just put it out into the marketplace by itself, people aren’t going to understand the story,” he says.

But even with the red and white version, there was still the matter of the true “banned” Jordan sneakers. Those also resurfaced this year, but in their original form, when sports agent Aaron Goodwin tweeted out pictures of an autographed set following episodes 3 and 4 of The Last Dance in late April.