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Behind the Design: Air Force 1 'Smoke & Mirrors'

Hi Tyler! What’s up? How are you? Good how are you doing? Good!You ready to go? Let’s get to work! 'Smoke and Mirrors' Hi, I’m Aja Zarrehparvar and I was the Footwear Designer on the 'Smoke and Mirrors' pack.

My name’s Tyler Seto, Senior Footwear Developer, and I helped bring these shoes to life. This is the ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ pack, this is the Nike Air Force 1 'Triple Triple Black.' And this is the Nike Air Force 1 'Dirty Triple White.'

When I hear 'Smoke and Mirrors', I think of a magic trick, someone is messing with me. I think it’s… what you see is not necessarily what you get.

The Air Force 1 is obviously something Nike has done for a very long time. What we really wanted to do was flip the script on something people thought they knew really well.

'Dirty Triple Whites' make me think of “beat.” I think of “cooked.” I think of a festival shoe. I also think of a really nice patina’d coach.

I think of two different subcultures to wear these type of shoes. One group, they keep theirs super clean. There’s that other group that takes honor in beating theirs up. I see those two lanes and I look to ours, we split it right in-between.

I personally love when I see people wearing their 'Dirty Triple Whites' out in the world. It really shows the community of individuals that we’ve talked about. 

These are actually my fiance’s shoes. I saw that she had been wearing them a lot. It definitely got into a “cooked” situation. I said, “If I get you a new pair, can I take these and take them apart?” I started to just cut them up and...

...scanning them, getting all the details that were part of her wear-and-tear process. I think when we’re telling this story, it had to be so authentic that we weren’t going to engineer any scuffs. These are all real scuffs, there are all real defamations...

The right and the left shoe are unique. The scuff marks on one side are only on that shoe and then you get the other scuff marks on the left shoe. 

That was superbly important to us because anything that was going to stand out as not being worn was going to take away from the storytelling of the shoe. 

Triple Black Air Force 1s… honestly, I think of someone who is wearing them for the most utilitarian purpose. A lot of people use it for practicality. It’s just all black, incognito, dress it up, dress it down. 

It works with anything. We had a lot of important conversations around this shoe, particularly with one of our Design Directors, Isaiah, who grew up in Atlanta wearing this shoe and talking about how the Black community has always rocked this shoe very genuinely and authentically. 

We really wanted to honor the fact that this was a premium shoe, this is something that they were rocking. This was really important to the culture and community there. So that’s why we went for the most premium option we’ve seen. 

We’ve utilized this matte finish which is also scratch-off ink, so as the scratch-off ink starts to wear away or you start to scratch it off, you’re going to get back to the OG Triple Black Air Force 1.

That challenge was… What does that journey look like, to then get to the OG Triple Black version of that? So we just had different trials, understanding and dialing in the different hardnesses.

We definitely didn’t want to damage the leather. We didn’t want it to be too hard to scratch off so we got something that was nice and clean that you scratch off. You get that original version but in a premium finish.

Premium materials, premium finishes, really thoughtful, really intentional, the most boutique version of this shoe that we possibly could.

I’m Aja thanks for watching Behind the Design on the Nike Air Force 1 'Smoke and Mirrors' pack. I’m Tyler and look out for these on SNKRS soon.