I like the baby blue Forces (even though they are probably women’s).

Orange and black Forces could be a nice summer shoe.

These Air Max 90/Free Hybrids are money.

Thanks to Redrum_SB @ Niketalk for the heads up.

Nike “Future” Air Force 1 – 1 of 1 for R. Fallon

Air Force 1 Baby Goods “Dolphins” Edition

The pictures of these have been around for a few weeks, but I feel like they are worth showing because of how excellent all of the shoes turned out. These are simple, interesting colorways and it’s impressive that stores that (presumably) have little to no experience designing shoes can come up with such compelling stuff. Is it worth the extra coin on the consumer’s end for a little co-branding? Sure, why not. Even though these companies won’t see much of the ultimate profit, I suppose adidas should be rewarded for picking companies/colorways that weren’t total shit.

Here’s some pics of the most recent pack.

Wood Wood

Dave’s Quality Meat

SneakersnStuff

Alife

Crooked Tongues

Styles VA

(This being one of the coolest shoes I’ve seen in the past several months. Nike Loopwheeler what?)

And now, just for a special little Monday treat, let’s run through some store/clothing brand collaborations that failed miserably. (And by “failed”, I mean “are ugly”. I don’t give a flying 747 fuck what they sell for on eBay.) Now remember, the “badness” (and that’s bad meaning bad, not bad meaning good) of each of these is purely my opinion. So, if you disagree…keep it to yourself so you don’t look like an idiot.

(Try as I might, I was unable to find any particularly egregious adidas collabos. And I did try. As far as I’m concerned, their collaborations bat with a pretty high average. Something Nike should look into: not greenlighting every single fucking “Nike x ______” that they come across. Give the interesting collabos to people that actually deserve them. Like JGoods, for example.)

Nike Dunk x Undefeated. I’ll be the first to say that Undefeated has come out with some great shoes under the Nike banner, but goddamn…these are fucking disgusting. The “throw some random colors together” concept (always a risky move) failed here. Failed very, very badly.

Jordan I x Levi’s. There’s nothing that says “Air Jordan” to me like some…Levi’s denim(?)

Nike AM1 x Kid Robot. The always classic hot pink, bright orange, metallic gold colorway. There’s no way Swizz Beatz saw these and signed off on them…is there?

Nike x Liberty Fabric. Now I realize these are for women…but would women even like these? They look like something Olivia Newton-John would have worn in the “Let’s Get Physical” music video. Ugh. Although, for that special brand of dude that likes buying Nike women’s shoes (go to www.niketalk.com and click “Nike Retro”), these would have gone great with a circa 2005-2006 Leroy Jenkins all over print hoodie. Think about it.

Reebok x Monopoly (or Parker Bros., more likely). These are actually awesome, and I didn’t know they existed until about 20 minutes ago. The concept of combining shoes with board games just about caused my mind grapes to explode. SO. MANY. POSSIBILITIES. You could design a Dunk Low to look like a Hungry Hungry Hippo. You could do a Nike Terminator with the big “N I K E” on the back made out of Scrabble pieces (with their respective point scores!). You could sell a giant pack of solid colored Dunks in an oversize Trivial Pursuit game piece. The possibilities are endless. Nike: if Reebok has Parker Bros. locked up, get on the phone with Milton Bradley ASAP.

First off, two of the three designs I’m going to show you involve Nike Flywire technology. Since all I knew about it was that it was used in the Hyperdunk (but now seems like we’ll start seeing it crop up a lot more), I figured it was time to get edumacated. So here you go:

Flywire “entails the use of high-tensile Vectran threads (stronger than Kevlar) which cut down on weight of the product yet adds stability” (Cool Hunting). Hm. That doesn’t seem so difficult to understand. The term “flywire” is cool too; it’s no “monkey paw” (which is the second greatest Nike technology name ever, just behind the oft-forgotten “mountain goat hoof“), but it gets the point across.

But enough of that technology jibber-jabber…on to the pictures.

The shoe below is the ’09 Air Max, utilizing the aforementioned flywire technology. Combine that with what appears to be a one piece Air Max 360 air cushion and you have some “shoe of the future” type shit. I bet these are as comfortable on your feet as Katie Holmes in her plush Scientology kennel.

Blue colorway…kinda boring.

Grey/black/red colorway…a little more excitement, but still lacking.

Yowza! Bright green and silver…that there’s the sardine’s whiskers. Lay the type, spread the ink, press to paper, run that shit!

These are called the “Hypermax”. Obvious cues from the Hyperdunk, plus Air Max. (The days of shoes being called things like “Air Revaderchi” or “Zoom Zvezdochka” are obviously long behind us.) Anywho, I like these quite a bit. If I still played basketball with any kind of regularity, I bet these things would work wonders. They look kind of like a Ken Griffey, Jr. signature basketball shoe, if that’s possible.

Last up are the Zoom FP (which stands for “Fun Police”). For those of you too young to remember, the “Fun Police” were a group of NBA players that starred in a Nike ad campaign in the late 90s, with the central theme that the players were making sure people were having fun when they played basketball. There were some awesome commercials centered around the Fun Police, so it’s a shame I could only find this one. And it doesn’t have sound. Hey, I’m the only one who posts here…what do you expect? Oh really? WELL YOU’RE NOT PERFECT EITHER.

Anyway, here’s what the Zoom FP looks like. An amalgam of the the Zoom Flight V (J. Kidd), the Air Garnett III (KG), and the Zoom Flight T Bug ( Tim Hardaway). The black ones look a bit too much like the Air Garnett IIIs for me, but the white ones have morphed into something completely new and awesome. Say what you want about the mass recycling of designs Nike has been doing lately, but I think these turned out well.

Nike Dunks. Obvious inspired by all-too-familiar school notebooks. (Either that or the notebooks John Doe used in “Se7en”?!? That would be SWEET.)

Nike Vandals. Inspired by Crayola.

Nike Dunks. Wait, did I see the Vandals were inspired by Crayola? Then I guess these are REALLY inspired by Crayola.

What I’m saying is that even with the above…Nike isn’t taking it far enough! I want to see some truly, TRULY balls-out “back to school” themed shoe designs. I mean, yeah we all used markers, crayons, and notebooks at some point or another but let’s get into some niche shit! I want to see shoes inspired by stuff like this:

1) A fucking TRAPPER KEEPER. I’m not sure how they could be incorporated into a shoe design other than using the pattern or something (or a lot of velcro). The above one is too boring though. How about something like this:

YES.

2) LISA FRANK FOLDERS. And not just in women’s sizes either. If you can wear jeans that look like they’re made out of spandex, then dammit you can wear some Nike Dunks that have pink and purple unicorns and rubies and emeralds and shit on them. Or, of course, pink and purple…hot dogs and hamburgers(?)

They could get some KILLER gradients going on with something like this.

3) WEDGIES. Slightly more abstract, but I think there’s some serious potential here. Seeing as how there are probably a good percentage of hypebeasts that get made fun of on a daily basis anyways (i.e. Q: “Do those jeans come in men’s sizes, douchebag?” A: “Um these are Nudie Jeans, they are super awesome”), I think some wedgie-inspired shoes would be a perfect compliment. Maybe do it McFettridge Vandal style, and have underwear material tear off to reveal a pasty white skin color underneath!

4) TEXTBOOKS. They’ve done notebooks…why not do textbooks? Included on side panels and tongues would be high-quality scans of actual pages from college textbooks! Not only would this bring in the older crowd, but Nike could probably charge extra for these “Premium” shoes (to help pay for the rights to the classic work of Berg/Tymcozko/Stryer).

5) “BACK TO SCHOOL” STARRING RODNEY DANGERFIELD. Include the team logo for the Grand Lakes Hooters on the back panel!

That should be enough to get them started on the ’09 colorways.

Making fun of random Nike colorways is practically like shooting fish in a barrel. For every Dunk Tiffany they have…they produce 5 of the above. However, this colorway got some blog airplay (www.sneakernews.com if you don’t believe me) and if the blogosphere is covering these…then dagnabbit us folks here at the JGCustoms blog are gonna steal some pics and info and cover it too.

Back to the shoe. Now, I know these are only being released in Europe, and it is my experience and understanding that those greasy foreigners (no offense to any European readers…I am referring mostly to Italians) love buying crazy-ass shoes in crazy-ass colors. So maybe Nike knows what they are doing, releasing these into the wild. However, that is no reason why us morbidly obese Americans (see what I did there?? America: 1, Europe: 1) can’t make fun of how unbelievably ugly those shoes are.

There is one outfit that those shoes would match. Yup, you guessed it.

Joseph’s amazing technicolor dreamcoat.

Not only are the colors a Roy G. Biv array of disgustingness, but there is some weird triangle design on there, vaguely reminiscent of a pre-1870s Navajo blanket:

Throw this in Photoshop, mess around with the Hue/Saturation a bit, apply it onto a Nike Tuned Air Max…and I bet you’d have something that looks exactly like the above disgrace to Air Maxes as a whole. Not to mention…what the hell do you need 5 pairs of laces for? One for each day of the work week? When you’re getting laughed at Monday, beaten up on Tuesday, by Wednesday…you’ll probably just wear a different pair of shoes altogether.

All right…I’m Silky Johnson’d out. The reason I take Nike to task more often than other brands is that people expect companies like Reebok to put out stupid-looking shoes in ugly colorways. Nike gets held to a higher standard (usually). So when they put out the above shoes, looking like a Math Exploration textbook threw up a chapter on geometric designs onto a shoe…I gotta say something.

The design isn’t bad…until you get down to those soles. I’m not sure what scale these pictures are, but my guesstimation leads me to believe the Lebron VI has a three inch sole on them. I am reminded of some 70′s style go-go boots or some crap, fat Jonah Hill in “The 40-Year Old Virgin”-style. I wonder if a goldfish could effectually habitate a sole that big. My guess is “absolutely”.

I don’t hate the shoe, but if Lebron goes up for some huge dunk and somebody gets tripped and somehow ends up getting a size 15 version of one of these babies to the face, that thing is coming down like a sledgehammer. Bron-Bron is gonna need a new pair at halftime because his foot is gonna be covered in brains.

Pics courtesy of a website that I don’t remember the name of.