Nike Dunk

Dunk

Soon after designing the Air Jordan I, Peter Moore set to work on a project temporarily named “College Color High”, which was aimed at the college basketball scene, using colour-blocked leather stitched panels to represent the different colours of each team. The Nike Dunk was released in 1985 at the Final Four college finals with the memorable tagline “Be True To Your School” and was the first basketball shoe to feature vibrant colours. This, combined with Nike’s ingenious youth-targeted marketing, couldn’t have been timed better. In the mid-eighties, the sport’s appeal both on- and off-court was snowballing, giving it a new lease of life. Basketball was becoming cool.

Design-wise, the Nike Dunk brought together the Jordan 1, the Nike Terminator and the Legend to create an aesthetic typical of that time. The result was a stitched leather upper with raised panels, a perforated toe box and a wedge midsole with concentric gum outsoles. The look was completed with a padded ankle and tongue, and unconventional eyestay positions for the laces. Though these were the latest developments in performance technology, by way of a happy accident they also had a stylish street style look. Thus, despite being popular in its day as a basketball shoe, technological advances drove the Dunk off the court.

Through the late eighties and early nineties, as the shoe dropped in popularity, it became more affordable and more readily available. But then the thin, flat, grippy sole, tough leather construction and lightweight nylon tongue that appeared on the Nike Dunk just happened to make it perfect for the skating subculture around 1998-2000. The fact that the Dunk was less commonplace in the late-nineties also aligned with skaters’ desire for authenticity, making their adoption of these once popular basketball shoes a foregone conclusion.

Ten years since they were taken off the production line, the original Nike Dunk finally returned. Coming to terms with the idea that skaters wanted plain Dunks and had an eagerness for retro trainers, in 1998, Nike released the Dunk High in nostalgic colourways. The updated version included a lighter nylon tongue, condensed body, voluminous swoosh and the use of premium materials, which all made it much more suited to skating.

1999 saw the arrival of the Dunk Low Pro B in California and the Dunk Low CO.JP in Japan. These low-top releases embraced the scene’s growing desire for unique customisations with experimental colours, attention-grabbing patterns and novel textures alongside further padding for skate protection. This gradual progression to skating culminated in the Nike SB Dunk being released in 2002 with a bulkier tongue and Zoom Air bag to cushion heavy landings. Nike only distributed this to an exclusive selection of shops at the centre of the skate scene, giving the stores commercial viability and solidifying Nike’s skating credibility.

As Nike began to try out new ways of creating shoes through collaborations with skate shop owners and artists, the story of the Dunk continued to expand, with some editions becoming more like rare artistic pieces than simple shoes. The Nike Dunk began with the basketball-inspired slogan “Be True To Your School”, but over the decades, it has developed into a sneaker of almost every colour that appeals to a whole host of subcultures off the court as well, becoming an integral part of modern street style.