Air Max 97 "OG"

The Air Max 97 arrived in 1997 as one of the more technically ambitious running shoes Nike had produced to that point. Its defining feature was a full-length Air unit, visible through a continuous window that ran the length of the midsole, a construction that had not been done at that scale before in the line. The shoe retailed at $150, positioning it at the premium end of the market at the time of release.

The OG colorway, widely referred to as Silver Bullet, is the version most closely associated with the model’s identity. The upper is built from layered horizontal lines of reflective silver material, a design reportedly inspired by the streamlined look of Japanese bullet trains. Those stacked lines give the shoe a kinetic quality even at rest, as the overlapping panels suggest motion and speed in a way that most sneaker construction of the era did not attempt. The rippling silver is broken by a white midsole housing and the exposed Air unit below, with minimal color interference across the entire profile.

At the time of release, the silhouette was polarizing. The low-profile toe box and heavily sculpted upper were a departure from the chunkier proportions that defined many performance runners of the mid-1990s. Over time, the Air Max 97 came to be recognized as one of the more forward-looking designs from that decade, and the Silver Bullet colorway in particular became the reference point for the model. Retroed versions have appeared since the original run, but the 1997 release remains the baseline against which all subsequent iterations are compared.