Any of you who have read this blog will know I have been a lover of Air Jordan shoes since I was a kid and couldn't afford a pair. To this day when I think about my childhood I can always recall my best friend's bedroom with that looming poster of a young Michael Jordan travelling through air with the flash bulbs of cameras going off and a beautiful pair of, now let me think, I think they were Air Jordan 3's. Fastforward 30 odd years and now I have more Air Jordans than I will ever admit to, especially my mother. It is an indulgence that sometimes comes over me. Buying Nike products is my weakness. I love everything about Nike. Firstly, it is attached to my name. Nicholas. The name Nicholas is derived from two words - Nike - and - LAOS . It means victory of the people or something quite similar. Nike was the embodiment of victory, a goddess no less. Sometimes when I am doing anything well, from throwing a strong punch with my boxing trainer Les, to striding out on my evening run as I hit my groove, well then, I sometimes feel like a goddess (wink emoji).
But in life, anything of the same thing done over and over, eventually tires us. We are all looking for the next thing. I don't think I will ever grow tired of Air Jordan shoes, it's just that now and then you just want to try something else. The jumpman symbol is now everywhere, it's been done to death. It's not that I don't still appreciate the creativity, the use of new materials or the changes in details, it's just always going to be an Air Jordan attached to Michael Jordan, who, one day soon, will age like the rest of us.
I must also be honest here and say I know little to nothing about basketball. I haven't played basketball since the mid nineties. I have no desire to play basketball and I don't really wear my basketball shoes for sport unless I am doing weights training. For me, basketball shoes are an aesthetic shoe for casual wear - nothing more. I train in running shoes and when I am dressing up I wear penny loafers, chelsea boots or whole cuts. But what a good basketball shoe does is make a funky outfit come together. It allows you to wear some velvet tracksuit style trousers with a hoodie, a pair of Nike running pants with a t shirt etc etc.
As I have often said on this blog, when I am cutting silk I am not interested in dressing up as a tailor. When you cut by hand using a rotary cutter you get fabric everywhere. It's not glamorous, it's not the prestige of chalking up a suit on the cutting table of a Savile Row tailor wearing a three piece. So athleisure is perfect for it. You have unrestricted movement, you have materials that don't seem to hug bits of clothing like wool does and you can add and remove layers as needed. As for how basketball shoes fit in to that analogy, well here's the thing. If you unfasten the laces you can get the shoes on and off very quickly. Which comes to the next point, I like to spend as much of the day as possible in bare feet. From the moment I get to the beach in the morning my feet love touching the earth as much as possible. And the same goes for when I am cutting silk, if I can avoid wearing shoes I will.
All this leads me to telling you about the Kevin Durant KD13 shoe I was shown the other day by a friend. They seemed to be a wonderful segue from the Jordan range, a really charming shoe that I hope has a strong life. And I hope that Nike pushes other lines of their shoes, especially in basketball, to experiment with new distinctive materials that have no reference to the Jordan. There is something about buying into a new story that is always exciting. The good thing about Nike is that they are probably already ten steps ahead and have thought this out themselves. I was so impressed with the company after watching the Tinker Hatfield episode on the exceptional series ABSTRACT on Netflix.
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