AIR JORDAN I

The first Air Jordan arrived as a basketball shoe and left as something much harder to categorise.

Its construction is almost plain by modern standards: stitched leather panels, a flat rubber cupsole, an encapsulated air unit you cannot see. The interest was never in the technology.

What the silhouette proved is that a shoe could carry a name, a story and an argument at the same time. Every signature line since has been working in its shadow.