F**king With the Swoosh: A Brief History

Few logos have as much cultural cache as Nike’s Swoosh. The iconic symbol was designed in 1971 by Portland State student Carolyn Davidson, who was just looking to get some extra cash for oil painting classes. She was paid $35 at the time, but as the logo went on to become as iconic as the Golden Arches, she eventually received enough Nike stock to match her iconic design – plus ultimate bragging rights! Despite its humble beginnings, Nike have been strict with their beloved logo, holding it to high esteem and never allowing any major alterations – until more recently.

In the past decade, the most notable example would be the reverse Swoosh, which has become the signature of rapper Travis Scott. Cactus Jack’s backwards Nike logo has become a recognisable part of his brand as a result of the multiple collaborations he’s helmed. Credit where credit is due, the success of Scott’s plethora of AJ1s has opened the floodgates for other collaborators to manipulate the logo. Before the Travis linkups, Nike still chose to subtly change their logo, but it was never the main branding detail, as it manifested in the forms of Mini Swooshes, Jewel Swooshes and the occasional reverse. There were also the mistakes that snuck through Team Swoosh's quality control department that have made big bucks for the lucky ducks who scored the defective pairs. Over the years, there has been plenty of altered logos (whether on purpose or by accident), but post-Travis colab, Nike have allowed their logo to be chopped, flipped and reversed en masse.

Scott was the one to bring the reverse Swoosh to the forefront of Nike’s catalogue, but here are some other ways that the Swoosh has been fucked with!

Oopsies, that was an Accident!

Some of the best examples of messed up Swooshes have been by complete accident. The wildest is why the Air Max Plus’s Swoosh looks so weird. When we talked to the designer of the TN, Sean McDowell, we asked, ‘Does the Swoosh look a little odd?’ He replied stating it was one of his biggest mistakes: ‘I was never really taught how to draw the Swoosh properly, so in my version it has a long tail and a short head’. As they were already way behind schedule, by the time anyone noticed the Swoosh was wrong, it was too late to do anything! Every single Air Max Plus since its birth in 1998 boasts this messed up Swoosh, but even wilder examples have come from factory mistakes.

The most famous would be the case of the 2018 ‘Reverse Shattered Backboard’, with one pair funnily coming with an upside down Swoosh. The US 7 was then valued at 900 times its original retail price with the factory flaw, selling for around $146,0000. In that same year, a single Air Jordan 1 ‘Gold Toe’ accidentally got through quality control with an upside down Swoosh and so did a Nike SB Dunk Low ‘Night of Mischief’ in 2019. In 2024, there was another major defect, with one Dunk Low ‘Dusty Olive’ completely missing its lateral branding.

Flip it, Reverse it

Before Travis Scott, Nike have flipped their Swoosh a number of times, albeit keeping it more subtle, by not making it the central design feature. The best examples of this are two pairs released in 1994, one being the Air Flare and the other the Air Darwin. The latter is set to return soon via a Supreme collaboration, twenty years after its debut.

The reverse Swoosh continued into 1995 with the Air Yoke and Air Ndestrukt, followed by the 2012 LeBron X and 2015 Air Max 2015. A year later in 2016, Nike launched the obscure Big Swoosh, which you could have guessed, boasted a gigantic reverse Swoosh. More recently than that, Nike added reverse Swooshes to basketball models with both the PG 2 and Zoom Freak 1 donning flipped branding. Despite the prevalence in history of reversed logos, it remains a well-known signature throughout most of Scott’s collaborative releases.

Go Wild With the Swoosh

Leading into the 2020s, Nike started to go wild. It all started circa 2017 when velcro and interchangeable Swooshes became all the rage, culminating in Travis Scott’s first Nike collaboration on the Air Force 1. Inline models continued to arrive with eclectic Swoosh designs, like the Dunk Low ‘Flip the Old School’, which no doubt references the defected pairs of the past few years. With the path paved by Travis Scott, a plethora of other collaborators began altering their Swooshes, with the likes of Slam Jam turning it upside down, OSKi making a shark Swoosh, READYMADE completely distorting the logo and Cactus Plant Flea Market going XL.

While Nike have always been subtly f**king with their Swoosh for years, Scott’s plethora of linkups have made it acceptable for Nike to carry out wild Swoosh alterations en masse.