"The Vibe of the Times": How Nike Became the Biggest Fashion Brand in the World

Biblical rains have always represented new beginnings, so maybe the typhoon rolling into Tokyo wasn't the worst news for John Elliott. In 2016, Elliott was in the city working on an upcoming collection when the call came through: Fraser Cooke, Nike's senior director of influencer marketing, was in town and wanted to hang. That's when the rain started. The conversation was, unavoidably, intimate: they crammed together under a balcony the size of a double bed to avoid getting wet. This was the sort of informal interview that Elliott, who used to draw sneaker designs and send them to Nike as a kid, had been waiting a lifetime for. He and Cooke talked about everything: different subcultures, music they were into, cities they love to visit, how their life paths lead to the drenched table they were sitting at. And, of course: Nike. The meeting went on like this for four hours, pausing every once in a while when the patter of rain could no longer be ignored. Elliott was an hour late for an epic sushi dinner at Kyubey Ginza. His dinner mates were mad, and instead of legendary sushi, Elliott got food from a convenience store that night. "But I made the right choice," he says. "Would make the same call one million out of one million times."

He'd been in touch with Nike before—the brand gave him some sneakers for runway shows. But after that meeting, Elliott finally got to give his take on the Nike Vandal, a sneaker that Elliott skated in as a kid. After practically a lifetime of patience, his first shoe sold out in only a couple seconds. He's not alone.

Today, designer Nikes like Elliott's are everywhere. If there is a connective tissue to fashion week in 2018, it's the omnipresent Swooshed sneakers and apparel. Nike's World Cup collections were spearheaded by Virgil Abloh and Kim Jones. And now, fashionable Nike gear is starting to seep onto the court, too through Elliott's collection with LeBron James and Serena Williams's U.S. open uniform designed by Off-White. At Paris Fashion Week this summer, there they were at Undercover, Sacai, Craig Green, Off-White, and Alyx. Fashion week is where brands and designers unveil their new collections, but it's also increasingly where they flex their hottest new Nikes. Where What are those? takes on a frantic and literal tenor among those in the audience. The strategy stands out from other sneaker companies, who chase down entertainers like Hollywood agents or appoint them brand creative director.

The bread and butter of Nike's business will always be mass-selling, blog-allergic sneakers. But the biggest, most profitable sportswear company on the planet remains steadfast in its commitment to letting starry-eyed designers unleash their strangest design inclinations on its shoes and apparel. "It's important to remember that the company is big," Abloh says, maybe underselling things. "It doesn't need to do anything niche, but they're recognizing and allowing young designers like myself to bring our own sensibility and flourish it, nurture it. That to me is what's more interesting: that a company as big as Nike even picks up the phone when a kid like me calls," he says, definitely underselling himself. But his point rings true: Nike could be a billion-dollar-a-year-in-sales company just by letting FootLocker sell its core models. Instead, it's breaking into fashion.

And while Nike is new to the world of fashion, it's increasingly operating—and spending—like a fashion company.The company recently projected it would hit $50 billion in sales by 2022. That's an intergalactic number: according to Forbes, Google's parent company Alphabet did $89.92 billion in sales in 2017, Walt Disney's were $54.94 billion. In the world of apparel, Zara's sales in 2017 were $29 billion. Perhaps a better comparison: Christian Dior, the current largest fashion brand in the world from a sales perspective, did $49 billion in sales last year.

The reasons for Nike's new status in the fashion world are legion. Its partners—Abloh, Burberry's Riccardo Tisci, Dior's Kim Jones, and Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo among them—could comprise one kickass fashion week on their own. A generation of new guard designers who grew up obsessing over Nikes have come of age and are now lovingly crafting the shoes in their image. And the current culture prefers to dress for the everyday in perfect-with-sneakers sweats and hoodies.

So, towards the end of my hour-plus conversation with Elliott, I tell him I have a take—a hot one. Nike is the biggest fashion brand in the world.

Elliott doesn't hesitate: "I hands down agree with that and I imagine that most people, whether they would forthcomingly admit that or not, know it. It's a truth, that's not a take, it's not controversial. That's a fact."

In January 2006, Rei Kawakubo sent a model down the Comme des Garçons Homme Plus runway, his black suit's trousers draping over a pair of sneakers from Nike-owned brand Converse. Nate Jobe, who was working at Converse at the time and is now senior footwear designer for Nike's sportswear innovation department, remembers someone sending him the images. It was the first he'd heard of it. "They would go buy Chuck Taylors off the shelf, and go put them on," Jobe explains of how designers at the time would get sneakers on the runway. Any other brand would still be using it as marketing material, but it was just another day for Jobe. "You'd be like, 'Hey, we're on the runway again,'" he says.

That ignorance is characteristic: A decade ago, Nike kept fashion at an arm's length. "Well, I've been here 16 years. I remember when I first got here, there was the F-word," says Jarrett Reynolds, the brand's senior apparel design director for Nike Sportswear and NikeLab. "I'm like, what? That was 'fashion.' We didn't talk about fashion." ("That's a very old internal joke from more than a decade ago," Cooke corrects.) Even today, Reynolds insists that "we're not obsessed with [fashion] as many people might assume outside of Nike."

He brings up the brand's relatively new and totally bizarro-looking Vapormax as exculpatory evidence. The shoe, with its knitted upper and bulging cysts of air sprouting underneath, looks like no sneaker that came before it. And while fashion prizes uniqueness, Reynolds says the shoe looks the way it does for performance reasons. "The intent of Vapormax is not to be a fashionable shoe, it's to be the best running shoe," says Reynolds.

Even if Reynolds insists that the Vapormax was made purely as performance, Nike still spends a lot of time convincing customers it's the coolest thing in the world: part of the Vapormax's early rollout included a Comme des Garçons collaboration and appearance on the brand's fall/winter 2017 collection. Getting on the runway is about "being connected to culture," says Jobe. When CdG remixes the Vapormax, that's "culture touching the most performance-driven Air Max we've ever made," Jobe explains. After Kawakubo, Acronym's Errolson Hugh got to play with the Vapormax, putting it in a campaign with the designer and John Mayer. Not a bad way to roll out what's ostensibly just a running shoe.

A decade after CdG's Converse adventure, Nike has grown comfortable with providing a designer with core shoes for their runway, and evolving from there. There's a reason the candy-colored Craig Green apparel on the designer's most recent runway matched perfectly with the Nike sneakers models were wearing: Jobe and his team spent time at a Hackney satellite office near Green creating shoes specifically to go with the runway.

One reason Nike can no longer treat fashion like the Industry That Must Not Be Named? "The world changed," says Reynolds. "Where collaborations used to be really niche; now, collaborations are pop culture." Annual H&M mega events paved the way for brands to team up with every influencer, children's cartoon, anime series, and bank. Nike was in on the practice early: the first Yeezy, after all, was a Nike.

And if Nike isn't putting out its versions of designer sneakers, others will: in the massive $55-billion sneaker industry, Saint Laurent has its version of the Air Jordan 1, Alexander McQueen makes a luxe version of the Air Max 1, and Céline made a beautiful vachetta tan version of the shoe that Nike promptly took back. "Sometimes they kind of irritate me," says Jobe. "I'm like, 'Why don't you come up with your own thing?'"

You can forgive designers, though, for trying to reshape their collections to grab the attention of a generation that's no longer interested in brogue boots and cap toe oxfords. As men clear out the suits and shirts in their closet to make room for fashionable hoodies and sweatpants, sneakers are what's left. For many, a shoe that was once reserved for gym day is now what's worn to work, to the bar, on dates. Nike is the biggest benefactor of this seachange. "That's how modern men dress, you know?" Kim Jones tells me.

Abloh puts it as only he can: "It's the vibe of the times."

Virgil Abloh, it's well known, prefers to text. "I hacked the iPhone," he tells me, and uses WhatsApp to draw on photos of designs. For example, the Louis Vuitton designer's World Cup collection for Nike came to life over two years' worth of messages with Reynolds. "I've got a new idea," Abloh would message Reynolds. "Take this logo off here, and put it on this thing. Take the pants and make them super long." "Then," Reynolds says, "he'll be like, 'All right, freeze it.'" But even if Abloh's hacked the iPhone, it can't simulate what it's like getting to Nike.

"Even my time on campus," Abloh said during a Nike talk last September, "it's the most exceptional design studio company talent in the world that's outputting just designed objects. They're sneakers but they're design-design." Nike now wants to incorporate that design-design into everything it does. So when the World Cup—a massive once-every-four-years global sports event—rolled around earlier this summer, Nike charged Abloh and Jones, both LVMH designers, with creating two collections for the lead-up.

The divide between fashion houses like Dior and Nike is also shrinking aesthetically. Streetwear is high fashion—if it wasn't already. "It just so happens that fashion has moved closer to sport and many designers see this natural evolution, so, in turn, the opportunities [for collaborations] make more sense now than perhaps they did in the past," says Cooke.

And as designers realize they need to make sneakers to be relevant, they learn that no company knows how to do that better than Nike.

All the designers I spoke to agreed that one of the greatest benefits of working with Nike is gaining access to the company's production abilities. Sneakers, often the result of proprietary technology developed over years, are notoriously difficult items to produce from scratch—the Swoosh removes that headache for collaborators. "You can really create anything [with Nike]," Elliott says. "That's just straight up not the case if you're doing it by yourself."

Nike would prefer its collaborators didn't try it at home. This sort of getting-to-know-one-another process Elliott went through is typical of Nike and its designer partners. Nike wants to be friends first, meet for freewheeling meals or during Tokyo typhoons. Jarrett Reynolds, the brand's senior apparel design director for Nike Sportswear and NikeLab, first met Matthew Williams of Alyx at a lunch with mutual friends a couple Paris Fashion Weeks ago. Their conversation was similar to Fraser and Elliott's: art, music, culture. Anything but work. The foundation of friendship helps when someone sends a 1 a.m. WhatsApp message, a Virgil Abloh special. ("It's almost archaic to use email," Abloh explains.)

When Nike brings someone into their inner circle, they make them family. "When we'll have a designer come to campus we've gotta make them feel really comfortable," Reynolds says. "And that could mean, the least amount of people in the room, that could be knowing the kind of stuff they like to drink, anything, right?"

It's about the little touches: When Elliott first visited the Nike campus, the San Francisco native was put in the building named after his hometown team's legendary wide receiver Jerry Rice. "I remember thinking that it felt like one big family," Riccardo Tisci tells me over emails just a week before his debut Burberry show.

But it's not all PB&J. The brand's collaborators make Nike's Beaverton, Oregon campus sound like a Wakanda-like utopia. In an interview with us last year, Tisci said, "I've learned more about technology from my collaborations with Nike than I have in 20 years of being a couturier." Nike prizes these feats of technology in a way that even the most accomplished houses in the world don't. Jones—who, it's worth reiterating, has worked for Louis Vuitton and Dior—says that what Nike does cannot be replicated, because it's where the brand puts all of its effort.

In exchange for its limitless technology, Nike gets everything that comes with teaming up with the world's hottest designers: prestige, luxury-house-level design, and big-name designer credentials. But it's not just these designers' talents that Nike is after—it wants the cachet that follows big-name designers in 2018. Nike strategically pairs new models with fashion designers who can push the shoes to a crowd that's constantly on the hunt for newness. Nike will have an idea of what it wants to do with a designer before any meetings take place. "[Virgil] was given the 10 shoes," Jobe explains. (A brand like Supreme, which often chooses sometimes-forgotten designs, like last season's Air Streak Spectrum Plus or the new SB Gato, and reintroduces them to the public, is an exception. "They're a cultural icon," says Jobe.)

Recently, Nike's found a way to get even more value out of its designer collaborations: by pairing them with athletes. Elliott made a shoe with Nike for LeBron James, then Abloh made Serena Williams' head-to-toe U.S. open uniform. The process takes Deion Sanders's famous If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good quote to its extreme. "I always thought that young athletes or athletes that have a sense of fashion can actually increase their performance if they feel like they look good," Abloh says of his recent collection. "It's like mind and body are linked."

It's not just mind and body that are linked, though. By putting its elite athletes with its top designers, Nike is also stringing fashion and sport closer together than ever. "When we pair our athletes with our creative partners we truly have an opportunity to realize the full potential of Nike," says Cooke. Reaching that Everest of potential doesn't come without growing pains, though.

Every workplace has its fights, and that includes Nike. Williams and Reynolds were locked in an argument over a design. "We were going at each other pretty hard," Reynolds says. But going at each other pretty hard means something very specific at Nike: Williams and Reynolds were arguing about whether or not something was built enough for performance. At Nike, coworkers argue over the future of both sport and fashion.

The next morning, Williams meditated and was struck with an epiphany. When he saw Reynolds on campus, they high-fived. "You're right," Williams said. "That thing wasn't performance." The push and pull falls to Reynolds to manage. Not even legendary streetwear designer Jun Takahashi gets to do whatever he wants with his running-focused Gyakusou collection, even if Reynolds finds the whole thing weird. "I couldn't imagine I'd ever be saying no to Jun Takahashi," he says.

Nike needs these arguments to get what it wants out of these collaborations. "We're asking for disruption, new ways of thinking, new ways of working," says Reynolds. "Money is not what pushes [the collaboration side]; it's about trying out new things. Whatever we do, if it's a success, that should lead to bigger learnings elsewhere."

Nike's all-in bet on designers stands out because it's in contrast with the direction other major players in the industry are going in. While Nike made a huge splash when it collaborated with Kanye in 2009, the brand's largely moved away from working with entertainers of his ilk. The Swoosh could still put on a decent concert with its entertainer partners: Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott, and Skepta. But Adidas, its largest competitor, has a full festival: Kanye, Pharrell, Pusha T, and Rita Ora. Over the past couple weeks along, the Three Stripes added Donald Glover, Action Bronson, and Kylie Jenner to its lineup. The star-powered strategy is paying great dividends for Adidas. Last year, Adidas passed Jordan Brand to become the second-most popular brand in the U.S. Nike's collaborators are making extremely cool-looking gear, but maybe today's consumers really do just want to buy shoes made by their favorite celebrities.

But what people like Williams might sacrifice in Instagram followers, they make up for in legitimate design talent. Nike wants the sort of person who needs a meditation session to come down from their design convictions. There's a reason Nike's collaborators often have design experience working at some of the most important fashion labels in the world. Abloh says that collaborators making routine colorway changes "was making me fall out of love with the whole sneaker industry...It's like, how many times can you load up Hypebeast and see the same shoe in a different color then need to have that?" Abloh wanted to go beyond the obvious.

Reynolds says that those two types of collaborations—designers versus entertainers—provide different thrills. When Reynolds sees Skepta on tour in the tracksuits he works on, he still gets really excited. But working with someone like Chitose ABe of Sacai helps Reynolds expand the limits of what Nike apparel looks like. When he gets back jaw-dropping samples from Chitose they're so mind-bendingly different and good that "attitudes change," Reynolds says. "You'll push the envelope on what silhouettes we do. We have to learn from our partners." Skepta, Reynolds says, "doesn't design clothes."

When Abloh was a teenager growing up in Chicago, he saw hometown icon Michael Jordan as a superhero. As a kid, Abloh would buy new sneakers from Nike and put them at the foot of his bed so they were the first thing he saw when he woke up. He bought flight jackets, shorts, and applied to Jordan's Flight School basketball camp.

Abloh was so enamored with Nike that at 15—just like John Elliott—he started sketching sneaker designs and sending them to Beaverton, getting a taste of what it would be like to be more than just a Nike consumer. Working with Nike now is a "a childhood dream," Abloh says. Jones, too, used to imagine all the sneakers he'd design and sketch them out as a teenager. "It was more fun to draw a pair of sneakers than a tee shirt or jeans," he says.

That a Nike sneaker was the first thing these now-accomplished designers took a stab at creating helps explain the brand's fashion explosion. The timeline makes sense: the first generation to come of age with Nike firmly at the center of culture is now old enough to be major players in the fashion world. Nike, then, deserves a certain amount of credit for setting these designers on the track to create this current streetwear-crazy moment—which leads to more fashion collaborations with Nike. It's all gone full circle.

These collaborators walk the walk, too. Tisci famously wears Air Force 1s almost every day. Jones's collection of Nike sneakers, last tallied at 600, is so vast that he rents out a storage unit to keep them in ("It's silly," he says). "This is a generation that was coming of age in the '80s and '90s and were influenced by hip-hop, club culture, skateboarding, and a more casual streetwear movement, as much as they were influenced by sport," says Cooke. "This is why you have designers effortlessly combining sport and street references into their fashion collections in a way that was not so commonplace for their predecessors. This is the new normal."

Recently, Reynolds was in a Shanghai factory freaking out with Matthew Williams again—this time over text. The two were going berserk over a jacket, part of Williams' future collection with Nike: one with built-in knit gloves and a face mask. The thing made Reynolds feel superhuman: he put the jacket on and started running around, pretending to punch through walls. Again, a Williams-Reynolds interaction made everyone stop and stare. "The guys from the factory were just looking at us like, 'What is going on with you right now?'" It's a crazed, indestructible sort of feeling only a certain sort of apparel can impart.

That feeling is at the center of everything that Nike wants to create—where fashion makes you feel like you can run through a wall. That feeling is the reason Abloh would leave his new sneakers at the foot of his bed, ready to unleash the superhuman ability of Jordan the next day, and why Jones keeps a storage unit full of Nikes. Abloh, Nike, and all its designer collaborators are now dressing a generation that grew up believing that's the feeling their clothes can, and should, give them. So they turn to Nike.