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In Search of… The HOLY GRAIL.

Here’s another pair of shoes that I am putting a Sneaker Fiends A.P.B. out on. The NIKE Air Max 180 Premium Opium is the shoe that I have to add to my archives this summer. If anyone can help me track down a pair in size 12 I will mail you a Air Jordan 20th Anniversary tee or whatever. Just help a brother out, but first let me give you a little background on the Air Max 180 shoes.

We all understand that NIKE revolutionized footwear by placing packages of air within the midsoles of athletic shoes. Air weighs less than rubber or styrofoam and it immediately decreased the stress that users put on their feet with heavier shoes. The question that designers at NIKE faced was how to visually translate the patented air packages so that the consumer could finally see what they cannot see. This is the fantastic conundrum that NIKE faces. How do you show the consumer nothing? And then convince them to pay for it?

The problem was solved with the Air Max 1 shoe. A porthole cut into the midsole allowed the consumer to peer straight through the shoe. In 1991, the Air Max 180 brought this concept to the next level, because the air package that was inside the midsole had now become the sole itself, further decreasing the shoes weight yet increasing the shoes flexibility and performance.

I love the A.M. 180’s for their design aesthetic. They look trippy. As a matter of fact, I think I was tripping off a hit of acid when I had this dream. In the year 2000, global warming will have robbed the Earth of her greatest natural resource – Air. You will have to go to retail outlets to purchase this item that was once the most democratized freedom of all, the right to breathe air. Oxygen will be a privatized resource like natural gas or oil and the companies that sell it will be similiar. I dreamt that I went into the Abraham & Strauss department store and bought myself a box of NIKE Air. To this day I aways smell my sneakers the second I remove them from the box.

Speaking of trippy stories, these shoes that I need for the collection are called the AIR 180 Priority Opium. This is what they do in the dark. Sick with it!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Fashion Faux Pas, Jig Lit Review, Sneaker Fiends United, The Addict. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.