NIKE VINTAGE RUNNING

So how close are they to the originals, because the way they made shoes then is not the same as today...
No you’re right. In the thought process, it’s totally different. Inadvertently some people would say we’ve gone backwards. But at the same time you can see we’re going forwards, because it’s the corporate forces which make the brand do more with less. Bill Bowerman was all about doing more with less. You can challenge us from a design perspective that we are doing too much on shoes. So some of the work we have done over the last couple of years with the FREE, Presto, even the Sock Racer, it’s really moving back to that natural kinda state of health and fitness, rather than being over-engineered. The Considered work is about that as well. It’s about going back to basics, the fundamentals and core skills of what it is to be a runner and a running company.

They don’t look like the shoes when they first came out do they? They look like how a shoe has aged over the space of 30 odd years in terms of exposure to oxygen and general usage. How did you achieve that effect?
These shoes were made with the technology that was available back then, and technology has moved on since. Part of the challenge is engineering them to the exact specs, but also embedding within those shoes the emotion of what the company was about in those early days. Not necessarily about creating a beautiful and perfect product, but creating a product that actually works. It wasn’t easy.

Was there a lot of experimentation in terms of how you aged the shoe?
I think a lot of it was trial and error and we’re still doing it now. It’s a craft unto itself. If you look into the denim business and other areas which have gone through some similar thought processes, it’s actually quite hard to achieve. It takes time, a lot more technique and a lot more care to create something that has that innate belief built into it. With the exact specifications of past materials - finished laces, sock liners, foam packs, toe boxes, heel counters and so on.