NIKE ACG FEATURE - PART ONE
TINKER HATFIELD INTERVIEW
What the hell was the lawnmower man all about?
The outdoors can be gnarly. You can be climbing a mountain, bombing down a single track on a mountain bike and dropping off ledges, you can be mountain boarding with big rubber wheels and doing crazy stuff. But I’ve never lost track of the fact that some guy who goes out and mows his lawn every Sunday morning is actually doing an outdoor activity. We just think it’s kind of funny to lump that person in with all the other things that go into the outdoors and I think, rightly so. I think it’s self-effacing, it says you don’t have to be a super-athlete or a super-crazy person to go have fun in the outdoors. If you’re rock climbing and you make a mistake, it’s very serious, but sometimes you make mistakes and it’s no big deal and it should be about fun. So that’s why there’s a lawnmower man.
Out of all the other ACG shoes, which do you think is the most influential?
Well it’s easy to say one of the more crazy designs like the Mowabb. But it’s not like you could go into small-town USA or just anywhere in the world and see the Mowabb for example. Because these were for people who were in the know, people who were interested in unique things. In the bigger view, the most influential might be the kind of product that meets the market on a much bigger scale, which is so hard to do. Not long after the Escape II was done there was a shoe called the Mada. Do you remember that shoe?
Sure, it’s plain and brown and outdoorsy looking.
Pretty nondescript really. Well a guy named Sergio Lozano, who still works for us and is a very fine designer, he took the Escape II and the Moab and he sort of turned it into the everyman’s shoe. I think that shoe was very influential because it took these ideas and turned them into product that anybody in the world could go and buy. We sold millions of those and I think that had a big impact on the way all outdoor shoes are still designed today. If you look at all the outdoors brands, they all have components from the Mada.
Check out our next feature: MATCHING YOUR KICKS AND CLOTHES!
