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Nike Air Max Zero: the shoe that lay in a drawer for thirty years

In 1985 Tinker Hatfield designed a running shoe with a window in the sole. Nike thought the design pushed things too far for the time, and Hatfield developed the idea into something the market could handle: the Air Max 1. The original sketch stayed on the shelf. Only thirty years later the design team pulled it from the archive and built it after all. Hence the name and the nickname attached to it: the one before the 1.

The remarkable thing is that you can recognise the parts of that sketch, even though they had surfaced separately elsewhere earlier. Look at the toe: there is no separate toe cap. The upper runs in one uninterrupted plane over the toe, an idea that in 1985 was used on the Sock Racer but not on a running shoe. Then look at the heel, where a separate band closes around the back like a strip. That separate heel element wouldn’t appear until 1991, on the Air Huarache.

So here is a 1985 shoe whose ideas reached the market before it did. Across the instep lies a band with a nubby texture, the air unit in the heel is kept small, and the whole is light and smoothly finished without layered panels.

For anyone following the line: the Air Max 1 is the version that made it, and the Air Max 90 then made the window larger. The Air Max 2090 does exactly the opposite of the Zero: it takes the 90 and projects it forward.

On this page you can see which versions of the Nike Air Max Zero are currently hottest according to the Hypescore, from what price they can be found and in how many shops they are in stock.