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When Houston Rockets forward P.J. Tucker hits the court, people notice. Last year, Tucker was crowned the league’s Sneaker Champ, and this year he’s strolled into games toting all manner of crazy shoes—a pair of Kobes signed by Kobe among them. But Tucker’s shoe choice for a ho-hum November matchup against the Brooklyn Nets made unusually large waves: Tucker was the first NBA player to hit the court in the Nike Air Fear of God 1, the Swoosh’s first collaboration with Jerry Lorenzo’s ultra-high-end streetwear line. Tucker has been known to hoop in non-hoops shoes (he and Nick Young have both balled in Yeezys), but this case was different. The Air Fear of God 1 might look like one of Lorenzo’s thousand-dollar shoes, but it’s designed for performance. Or more accurately, Lorenzo says, performance and that signature dialed-in FoG style.
He started talking with Nike some three years ago, he explains—part, clearly, of the megabrand’s push to be taken seriously as a fashion entity. “We looked at a few different areas of Nike, from training to football, and landed on basketball, which is kind of the super sweet spot for any American designer,” Lorenzo says. “So much of fashion culture is rooted in Nike basketball specifically, and I jumped at the opportunity to play in that area.”
But Lorenzo didn’t want to make a shoe inspired by basketball, and Nike didn’t want him to make a shoe that only lived on the court. “One of the things that Nike noticed,” Lorenzo recalls, “was that back in the '80s and '90s, their performance shoes transcended the court, and kids were wearing their performance shoes on court and off court just as much.” Think of early Air Jordans, or even weirder shoes like the the now-cult Foamposites: the best Nike basketball shoes were also the coolest ones to wear to school. “I think you look at 2018, and a lot of kids that go to buy performance specific shoes specifically wear those shoes for performance only,” Lorenzo continued.
In part, that’s because the demands have changed: the modern NBA athlete simply demands more of his shoes than ever before, which means that when compromises are made, they’re made on the design side, not on performance. It seems like we might be past the most intense period of high-tech hoops shoes—LeBron’s two most recent shoes, for instance, are far more wearable than the straight-out-of-Transformers LeBron 11s, and the industry-wide push toward knit and woven sneakers, along with low-tops, means a broad swath of shoes that feel more casual. But we’re not there yet. And who would know better than Lorenzo? If the modern, post-dress code NBA has a favorite label, it just might be Fear of God: the brand’s skinny sweats, drapey tees, and chunky sneakers have become a constant in pregame tunnel-walk Instagram shots. (It’s not for nothing that Nike also asked Lorenzo to design a collection of on- and off-court gear, all of which releases on December 15th with the shoe.)
As far as Lorenzo was concerned, there was only one way to make a shoe that checked both boxes: to start entirely from scratch. “I challenged Nike, and I said, ‘Hey, I think the only way to really do this is to create something new, and in order to do that, it not only has to be a new design, but I think it has to be a new shape. It's got to be a new silhouette, it's got to be a more modern proposition on the shoe,’” he explains. Instead of giving his spin on an old model, or slapping a fresh colorway on a slightly tweaked edition, he wanted the kind of thing you’d be used to, if you’re the kind of guy who runs his own brand and has serious opinions about zipper weight. Happily, Nike agreed: “I never felt pushback, or that we weren't speaking the same language. It was just a matter of how do we approach this and how do we do this? How do we honor this opportunity? And for me, I honored the opportunity as such that I was kind of willing to not do it if it wasn't done a certain way.”
That meant insisting on control over what he knew best, and ceding ground to Nike on typical Nike territory. “I'm not the best with design lines,” Lorenzo acknowledges, “but I think I am one of the best when it comes to understanding shape and silhouette. So one of the first steps was, I brought in my last from Italy, the shape that I spent years developing, and flew that in to Beaverton. I worked hand in hand with their basketball team, and built a new last on that old last that kind of spoke to a sleeker, more slender, modern shape and still provided the athlete with the best performance. And then the design lines just kind of came naturally after that.” It might sound insignificant, but that’s a big deal. Shoe lasts—the foot-shaped form that shoemakers build their shoes around—are essentially proprietary. Nikes work for just about everybody because their lasts are so dialed in. Lorenzo’s Fear of God sneakers have such a dedicated following because of their unique, wedged-sole shape—because of their last. (Custom lasts are also expensive. Which means that, even at $395, the Air Fear of God 1 winds up being something of a bargain.)
From there, Nike’s design team went to work. “I was like a kid in a candy store, just talking about Zoom Air and the Air that wraps around your foot, and stacking that on another Air, and it's like this concept car of technology rammed into this basketball shoe,” Lorenzo says. The upper is suede—“That speaks to luxury,” Lorenzo says—as is the footbed. In other words: this sucker is comfy. “When you put the shoe on, it not only feels like you're wrapped in luxury, but when you stand up, it's kind of like you're bouncing on a cloud,” Lorenzo says, enthused. “It's a sensation that I don't think you have felt from any other shoe.”
The response to the shoe has been fairly distinct, too, as Tucker’s on-court debut proved. That Tucker was the first to wear it, and not one of Nike’s flashier signees, was the point, Lorenzo says. He’s designed a deeply flashy shoe for the league’s least flashy guys: “I'm kind of looking to the sixth man on each team, some of these guys that come off the bench, some of these guys that aren't necessarily highly celebrated or marketed, and saying, ‘Hey, we see you too.’” That’s part personal history—“I was probably a sixth man the majority of the time, I came off the bench,” Lorenzo says—and part philosophical. “I think you can look across all sports and it's usually the team with the deepest bench that wins the championship,” he says. “And I think this is a good time to celebrate those role players and to celebrate those selfless athletes—I guess through a product that you historically would have seen on a superstar instead of those guys.”
Like, say, Tucker. He changed at halftime, but only because he always changes at halftime. (“I’m definitely going to wear them again,” Tucker told Hypebeast.) In what might be the wildest season for sneakers in NBA history, the Nike Air Fear of God 1 stands out: a high-fashion luxury performance hoops shoe—designed for sixth men.
