40 Years from Lift-off, Air Jordan Still Flying
Michael Jordan’s first Nike photoshoot in October 1984, here with the Air Jordan ‘Black toe’, Peter Moore’s favorite colorway. - Photograph by Chuck Kuhn
On April 1st 2025, the Air Jordan 1 celebrates its 40th anniversary. What makes that number seem almost crazy is that we are still wearing and talking about the shoe. I once asked Peter if he had any inkling when he designed it that kids would still be wearing it decades later, and with a laugh and a smile he shook his head and said, “Nope!”
I doubt even MJ himself could have predicted it, and in March 1998 when he laced up a pair of Air Jordan 1s for the last time to honor his last appearance at Madison Square Garden as a Chicago Bull, while MJ might have been preparing for retirement (the second of three), his shoes were only just getting started on their journey to becoming a global cultural icon.
But why did this happen? Like most sneakers at the time, the Air Jordan was meant to be sold for a year or two and then be replaced by a newer model. Yet, as Peter once pointed out to me with great amusement, kids are still queueing up around blocks on release day to get a pair that never even saw Michael Jordan play. So what is it about the shoe that means that four decades after Peter designed it, millions of people around the globe still clamor to buy the Air Jordan?
Designed for MJ
From birth, the Air Jordan was designed for Michael Jordan. One of Peter’s guiding mantras was ‘Form Follows Function’, which meant from day one he wanted to create a shoe that was a response to MJ’s specific needs. At the time, this was rare. Signature athlete shoes were usually just a production model with the endorsing athletes name slapped on it. When it came to MJ though, Peter and Nike marketing guru Rob Strasser wanted to give him a shoe built around him.
“When it came to his shoes, Michael really knew what he wanted. At Carolina, his Coach, Dean Smith, was a Converse guy, and he was like drill sergeant, so Michael had to wear Converse on court. But the shoe he really liked was the adidas Forum—to the point that he was in the Forum in practice and right up until game time. He liked adidas basketball shoes because they had a low to the ground design, which he said gave him great court feel. He wanted the Air Jordan to have the same feel.”
Michael had good reason to point Peter in the direction of the Forum, because it was by far the best basketball shoe of its day. Designed by Jacques Chassaing, who Peter would later go on to work closely with at adidas, the Forum was a groundbreaking shoe that had been designed with performance foremost in mind. Chassaing had spoken to some of the NBA’s top players to discover exactly what they wanted out of a shoe and used their feedback to create a shoe that was like nothing before it. Packed with technical advances, one of its main features was a cross-piece and strap that Chassaing had designed to emulate the strapping that he had seen players wearing to provide extra support to the ankle, and guided by MJ, Peter took inspiration from the Forum when designing the Air Jordan.
“Knowing how much Michael liked the Forum, when I sat down to design what the Air Jordan shoe could look like I placed the belt up at the collar that comes round from the heel to the upper eye stays, which was influenced by the "X" crosspiece on the Forum.”
The adidas Forum, the most advanced basketball sneaker of its day and favorite of Michael Jordan before he signed for Nike. - Image courtesy of adidas A.G.
A feature that didn’t come from the Forum though is part of the shoe’s name —Air. Air was not a new technology for Nike. The idea of using an encapsulated air bubble to provide cushioning had made its debut in 1978 on the Tailwind running shoe and was already being used in other Nike basketball shoes such as the Air Force 1 and Air Ship. However, up to that point, Air hadn’t enjoyed the success it would later see when Peter and Rob Strasser revamped and relaunched it in 1987, so Nike were keen that their new star signing’s shoe was also an Air shoe. There was a problem though—MJ was not a fan.
“He was very wary of Air at first, because he thought it would make the shoe too high. He was scared about rolling his ankle, but I said we’d keep it as low to the ground as possible. So, we designed the cup sole to be as low as possible and created an Air capsule that was as thin as we could get it. We had lots of arguments with Frank Rudy (the inventor of Air) over it because he thought it was too thin to provide any benefit, but we had to keep Michael happy, so it had to be.”
It's clear then that the Air Jordan was very much designed specifically for MJ, and it was Peter’s adherence to form following function and designing the best possible shoe for the athlete that made the shoe the masterpiece it still is. It was a shoe that was not designed to be beautiful, but became so as a result of being designed to perform.
An Infinite Canvas
Another reason the Air Jordan continues to be one of the best-selling shoes of all time is that as much as it was designed to perform, Peter and Rob Strasser wanted the shoe to be easy to produce in multiple colorways.
“The original concept of the Air Jordan shoe was to have a home shoe and an away shoe. Back then, it was a whole new way of doing things. Rob’s point was, if you were going to have one shoe for sale, why not have two? I took an existing outsole and drew up different color combinations and styles for the upper. Then I sat down with Michael to pick the two styles he liked best.”
At the time, although the Puma Clyde was a rare exception, it was relatively unusual for a basketball shoe to come in more than one color. Peter however, wanted to do something bold and different.
“I started off the meeting by saying, ‘Michael, let’s break the color barrier. Let’s do a predominantly black shoe with red details.’ At that time, all basketball shoes were white with maybe a small bit of color. I sketched him all the different colorways, which were always red, black, and white, but he didn’t want red, black, and white. And he said, ‘I want Carolina blue and white.’ I said to him, ‘But you can’t wear Carolina blue and white. I mean you can wear it on the street, but you can’t wear it in the game. The Bulls colors are a red, white, and black.’ So, he said, ‘Those are the devils colors.’”
Despite MJ’s reluctance, Peter designed the Air Jordan to take color, constructing it from multiple panels that could be colored up to create different color combinations. While its first colorways, the infamous black and red ‘Bred’, the red and white ‘Chicago’, and the black, white and red ‘Black toe’ have gone down in legend, Peter’s design meant that the shoe would go on to be sold in many different colors, including MJ’s Carolina blue and white.
“When I first saw it, I said, ‘I’m not wearing that shoe, I’ll look like a clown.’ Peter Moore, who designed the first two shoes, told me to just look at the shoe. ‘Put it on and look at it. Spend some time with it. If the shoe doesn’t grow on you, we’ll change it.’ The more I looked at the shoes, the more they started to grow on me. I told Peter, ‘Every time I wear these shoes in practice, my teammates come up to me and tell me they are the ugliest looking shoes they have ever seen.’ He says, ‘Guess what they are doing? They’re looking at them. No matter what they are saying, they are paying attention.’ That changed my whole perspective. First and foremost, the shoes had to perform the way I wanted them to perform. How they looked was a whole different issue, because you have to think about marketing strategy. You want people to pay attention. If you see somebody walking down the street in pink shoes, you are going to look at them. That’s exactly what happened with the first shoe.” Michael Jordan
Early Air Jordan range showing color options. - Image courtesy of Nike, Inc..
Peter would take the same idea and replicate it with the Dunk. Originally called the College Color High, it was aimed at university teams and students and released in colors that reflected those of their NCAA basketball teams. Like its close sibling the Air Jordan, the shoe’s construction allowed for endless color options. It’s popularity with skaters made it the perfect shoe for Nike’s SB division which retooled the shoe with Zoom Air. The shoe never seems to have gone out of style thanks to the ease with which it can be adapted for the latest collaborations and color trends.
Nike Dunk advert from 1985. - Image courtesy of Nike, Inc..
Although it’s a corner stone of street fashion today, Peter and Rob Strasser’s conviction in color was bold at the time. From the original Bred to Virgil Abloh’s Ten, and Dior to Travis Scott, Peter and Rob Strasser’s prescience in making the Air Jordan a canvas that allowed almost infinite color-ups and combinations has allowed the shoe to remain fashionable and in the spotlight for decades.
Storytelling
From early on at his time at Nike, Peter made storytelling an intrinsic part of the brand’s advertising and comms. The Nike athlete posters he created adorned the bedrooms of millions of Americans, not because they were selling a brand, but because each told a story.
“To my mind, Peter Moore was the first person to bring storytelling and glamour to the sporting goods industry. With his brilliant and clever posters, he was the pioneer of turning athletes into superstars. For the first time, people started to see athletes in a different light. Before, they were people who performed on a Sunday and then disappeared for the rest of the week. Peter changed that by giving them a personality, or perhaps it’s more correct to say that he brought it out of them.” Tinker Hatfield
The legendary ‘Jumpman’ poster, that announced MJ’s arrival in Chicago.
- Image courtesy of Nike, Inc. Creative direction by Peter Moore, photograph by Chuck Kuhn
From convincing MJ to sign with Nike to the creation of the first Jordan campaign, storytelling was a key part of building a brand around Michael. It had to be. He was a third pick rookie from North Carolina that most of America had never heard of. But they soon would. The effectiveness of this storytelling approach to marketing was never more evident than when Nike faced a crisis when the NBA threatened to fine the Chicago Bulls if MJ wore uniform code violating black and red shoes.
“The thing was we had on the water probably 25,000 to 30,000 pairs of shoes in the black and red, so we had to figure out what we were going to do. If Michael wasn’t going to play in the shoe, that was a big problem.”
Needing to come up with a solution as quickly as possible, Peter and Rob got together with Nike’s advertising agency Chiat\Day and came up with a TV spot that has gone down in legend—the infamous ‘Banned’ commercial.
“As the Bulls were playing in Oakland, we arranged to do a shoot over in San Francisco. Chiat\Day had come up with a script, and we had apparel ready. We got a special deal with the Bulls to use Michael for half a day. We told them it would be the only time we’d use him during the season, which didn’t end up being true, but it’s what we told them because we had to do the ad. All Michael needed to do was stand there and bounce the ball, and then we’d slap black bars on the shoes in post. So the ad went out with the strap line, ‘Fortunately, the NBA can’t stop you from wearing them.’ We sold out the 30,000, and I think another 50,000 on top of that. It seemed like every kid in the world wanted a pair of them after that.”
Using the power of storytelling, Peter and Rob Strasser not only solved a problem, they turned it into an advantage, creating a legend and that continues to be a core part of Air Jordan’s story today. So much so that in the shoe’s 40th year, Nike celebrated the re-release of the Bred Air Jordan by creating an entire ‘What If?’ campaign around the ‘Banned’ commercial that Peter and Rob Strasser put together in just twenty-four hours. It’s a campaign that demonstrates that almost four decades after Peter and Rob departed the brand, their legacy of storytelling remains at the heart of how Nike communicate.
A Game Changer
The history of sports marketing is replete with milestones, but Nike’s first Jordan campaign was a total gamechanger.
“Air Jordan, from its inception, was far more than a signature shoe. We wanted to change the way athletes were marketed.”
Michael Jordan was of course not the first athlete to be endorsed by a sports brand, but encouraged by Sonny Vacarro, the Nike basketball guru who first advised Nike to sign him, with MJ Peter and Rob Strasser revolutionized the relationship between brand and athlete. More a marriage than an endorsement, they dared to throw the entire weight of Nike’s basketball marketing budget behind MJ, something that no brand had dared do before. Adopting the endorsement model that super-agent Donald Dell had built around tennis players like Stan Smith and Arthur Ashe, Peter and Rob worked with Dell’s assistant David Falk to do the same with MJ, building a brand around him, not just a product range.
“It sounds so simple now, but it broke all the rules for how our industry operated. Nobody had taken a player, created shoes and apparel that actually tied to his style, and then launched it all at once—with advertising, POS, packaging, the whole deal.”
Image courtesy of Nike, Inc..
This new style of marketing was something that the major retailers were not used to, meaning that initially they didn’t foresee the incredible demand it had generated. However, they soon woke up to it, and sports marketing would never be the same again.
“The complete Air Jordan package landed in stores in April 1985 and, from the first day, it was a rocket ship, selling more than $100 million in its first year. But the shoe was not a big success with retailers at first. We showed it to Footlocker, expecting them to buy 10,000 to 20,000 pairs. They bought 5,000. So we went to the small inner city retailers. They bought them all. So then the shoe was launched and it was on the shelves. They opened their doors and there were so many kids lined up that Floyd Huff, president of Footlocker, called Phil Knight and said, ‘What did you do to us?’ Knight said, ‘I’ll connect you with Rob Strasser.’ Strasser picked up the phone and said, ‘We showed it to your guys; they only ordered 5,000 pairs.’ Huff says, ‘I want 50,000 pairs. Can you get them for me?’ So now we had to start making shoes like crazy, and it went on and on like that for the whole year.”
Four Decades Later
The place MJ and the Air Jordan have people’s hearts today means that Michael and the shoe have become a part of their lives. People have proposed and gotten married in Air Jordans. Peter’s Wings and Jumpman logos are permanently tattooed on millions of body parts. Game worn Air Jordans sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. Spike Lee and Ben Affleck have made movies about them.
While the elevation of his shoe to cultural icon was something he never envisioned, even Peter recognized what it meant to people with a poster of the shoe in his favorite red, white and black color-way, or ‘The Tuxedo’ as he called it. - Artwork by Peter Moore
For millions of people around the world the Air Jordan is more than a shoe, it’s their connection with MJ and the determination to win that he stood for, whether they saw him play or not. Peter understood that people would want this connection as soon as he started working with MJ. He knew even before Gatorade that we would want to be like Mike, so when it came to designing the shoe, as much as he designed it for MJ, he designed it for all those who were inspired by him. And this more than anything is the essence of its success. As Peter himself put it:
“It was all done by the gut feeling of what’s the right thing for the kid in the street.”
While he never set out to create a cultural icon in the Air Jordan, the shoe and so many of Peter’s creations have become one because he understood the power of branding and storytelling, and creating a product that met the needs of both the athlete and the fans that followed them. So it’s no accident that the Air Jordan has left its mark on the world—that’s exactly what Peter designed it to do.
Happy 40th birthday Air Jordan, your father would be proud.
By Jason Coles, author of Peter Moore: Sneaker Legend
All quotes by Peter Moore unless otherwise stated.
PETER MOORE: Sneaker Legend
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