The seven-bubble bad boy of Nike’s celebrated Air Max family, the Air Max Plus (AKA TN) is still the sneaker kingpin Down Under. Stomping onto the sneaker scene in the late 1990s, designer Sean McDowell’s serene vision of Florida’s beaches was
The Genealogy of a Transgressor: The Sky Air The design ancestry of the baddest member of Nike’s Air Max family is, of course, anything but straight-forward. In 1997, Nike hired rookie designer Sean McDowell to work on the elusive ‘Sky Air’ proje
The ‘Sky Air’ would utilise a trio of previously unseen manufacturing techniques, including McDowell’s lofty idea of a gradient fade – a central component to his ambitious vision. ‘As soon as I heard “sky”, I was like, oh my god, I just saw this am
The ‘Whale Tail’ That Breached Australia’s Underground They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Well, so is the beast. In Australia, the TN’s postcard-perfect sunset was interpreted as a spray-paint fade (emblematic of Australia’s railway e
Graffiti, rave, and eshay sub-cultures throughout Sydney’s Greater West and Melbourne all adopted the TN, Nike’s seven bubbles becoming part of a broader sartorial outfit usually featuring the likes of Polo, Nautica and, of course, the all-important
A Rogue Son Rises Retina-blasting colourways have become fundamental to the TN’s enduring success in Australia. Originally ignited by the OG colourways – ‘Hyper Blue’, ‘Orange Tiger’, and ‘Grey Shark’– it didn’t take long for Foot Locker to start
One of the more recent hits for the TN was undoubtedly the ‘Lava’ colourway. Originally arriving in 2015, the molten-hot TN hit shelves just months after Kanye West’s Nike Air Yeezy 2 ‘Red October’, and continues to be one of the more hallowed colou
Gradually outgrowing its hard-edged heritage, the reputation of the Air Max Plus has certainly softened, and is now being embraced by a broader demographic in Australia. Still, that’s not to say that any of us forget how the Air Max Plus stomped its
For Foot Locker, the Air of the future is still Tuned. The challenge lies in continuing to push the boundaries on a sneaker routinely shattering the status-quo. ‘What else can we do with it? What can we play around with?’ says our insider. ‘How can
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