Celebrating Air Max Day 2021 with art and ecology

The first sneakers with a visible Air Sole appeared in stores on the 26th of March back in 1987.Tinker Hatfield’s iconic suspension debuted on the Air Max 1, and gave us our first chance to take a peek at the inner workings of Nike’s sneakers.

Footshop, Nike and our future

Those are the keywords for our Air Max Day 2021 campaign. To accompany it, this year we decided to contribute to making public spaces more pleasant, highlight key ecological topics and offer a solution. For this, we’re going to use art, or more specifically, a big mural in Prague’s Holešovice district and also in Budapest.

You, me, Nike and our planet all share the same future. We can’t change it’s going to look in a single day. But we can through gradually understanding current issues and taking small steps towards solving them in our everyday lives. We have to realize that everything we do has some sort of impact. Bigger or smaller, that’s not really the point. The point is that everything has an expiry date and by pushing that date further away, we realistically help everything around us.

350 square meters of art and cleanliness

A huge mural on the side of a building, meant to share this message, will soon appear right round the corner from our Vnitroblock store. Courtesy of Czech artist David Strauzz, who will be using 130 kilograms of a special paint to create it. This special paint, called Artlite, has the ability to absorb dirt particles from the surrounding air thanks to photocatalysis. Simply put,  when the paint comes into contact with sunlight, a chemical process that causes the decay of harmful particles takes place, transforming them into simple molecules of salt.

David Strauzz in from of his piece of art at Prague metro station

Even though the air we breathe is free, we need to realize how important it is to take care for this crucial element. In the long term, Prague’s air quality is worse than ideal, so along with Nike, we started to think about how we could help some of the more difficult areas. So for this year’s Air Max Day we decided to create a mural that literally absorbs the impurities from the air around it, while introducing a piece of modern art at the same time.

The painting of the mural will begin on the 6th of April and will have a total area of 350 square meters. The Budapest iteration will be very similar, with The Goods.co taking care of business from roughly the middle of April.

We’re looking forward to showing you both of them here, too.

This project is another part of our continuous collaboration with Nike, where we focus on topics related to ecology and our environment. Last time, we took a closer look at environmentally friendly commuting – you can read more about it here.

The best releases of the month of Air

Same as last year’s Air Max Day, we’re happy to serve some brilliant releases that included a wide range of models from this legendary product line. Apart from the highly limited pairs, our selection of Air Maxes naturally increased. For example, take a look at the women’s outdoor model Nike Air Max Viva, which is a great choice for walking trips and a suitable alternative to hiking boots.

Another new addition is the Nike Air Max Structure, which originally came out back in 1991 and is making a comeback in three OG colorways, one of which is exclusively women’s.

Other models worth mentioning are the slightly crazy version of the Vapormax silhouette, the Air Vapormax EVO NRG and the new Air Max 95 Premium, both of which can be found on our online store. 

As I’m writing this, I realize that there are many more general releases worth mentioning, and I can’t help myself, I have to redirect you towards all the Air Maxes we have at Footshop. We’ve got about 250 of them.

Limited March releases

As far as special models go, this month, you could find a whole bunch of them on our Releases platform.

I’d like to start with the Nike x CLOT collaboration, titled Kiss of Death, which placed the Air Max 1 in a completely different light. A specialty of this model is the translucent toe-box, through which you can either see the Chinese symbols inside the sneaker, or someone’s dirty socks, depending on the occasion. The sole has a brilliant graphical interpretation of the pressure points on our feet.

Although the Nike x CLOT come in a beautiful box, there’s a different model with really amusing packaging – the Nike Air Max 90 Bacon, which contains shades of basically everything you can find at the butcher’s.

The futuristic Nike Air Max Pre-Day is wrapped in lime green shades, and looks exactly how I imagine sneakers in 2031 will look like. You can clearly see how Nike takes inspiration only from the best. In this case, we are talking about the piece that reminds us of retro model Nike Daybreak with visible Air Sole.

As you can find hundreds of Air Maxes on our website, it should by now be clear to you that you should go check them out. And if you liked some of the special releases and feel bad for missing out, keep checking our Releases platform and try your luck in another raffle.

If you’ve been watching us for a longer time, you already know that we always prepare something special for Air Max Day. Take a look at how we celebrated last year here.