Air Max 1 "Varsity Royal"

The Varsity Royal is one of the original Air Max 1 colorways, a piece of the 1987 release that introduced visible Air to the world. Tinker Hatfield designed the Air Max 1 after a visit to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where the building’s exposed structural guts inspired him to cut a window into a midsole and show the Air unit that Nike had been hiding for years. The royal blue makeup, blue on white with the red accent the early Air Max 1s carried, is among the cleanest expressions of that idea, a simple sport palette on a shoe whose real statement was the technology you could finally see.

That window changed everything. Putting the Air bag on display turned a cushioning feature into a design language, and the Air Max line that followed became one of the most important franchises in Nike’s history, spawning decades of models and an entire culture around visible Air. The Varsity Royal sits at the start of it, an OG colorway Nike has returned to many times because it is foundational rather than fashionable. The Air Max 1 has since been a canvas for some of the most celebrated collaborations in sneakers, but the original colorways are the reference point those projects build from. For an archive the Varsity Royal is a cornerstone, the shoe that made the inside of a sneaker its most famous feature.