story

I am Samuel Ross, the founder and creative director of A-COLD-WALL*. My name is Laura Song and I am the senior manager for footwear design. My name is Matthew Hay, I am the senior

PLM here in Europe for men's footwear. The TN journey is almost the third chapter of my relationship with Nike and the TN is probably the greatest icon of European sportswear and sneaker culture. It is really one

of the crown jewels that remains kind of untouched in the Nike portfolio. The main inspiration was about the idea of exposing engineering. You will see in the details of the shoe how we are highlighting the airbag, how we are highlighting translucency, 

how we are highlighting materials being worn away. I wanted to have this perspective of the making process visible and the process of fragility or imperfection, almost visible. 

So there are new ways in which the graphic design is moving forward. We have actually laser etched away from a leather Nappa that has been developed with Nike. Every product is genderless. So there is a balance

between innovating and pushing the color relationship between A-COLD-WALL* and Nike forward, through the Cobalt blue, for example. And then there is this idea of legacy through the chalk, slate, off white tones and then the blacks 

and the charcoal. So it is a pretty methodical underpinning as to why some of these colors have been selected. And the beautiful idea with these is that as you wear them over time, whatever color you are seeing here is going to suddenly kind of reveal over the whole shoe. When you think about the shoe,

it is community. You think about the TN you think about community. That kind of street uniform that we see adopted by so many people in our key cities here in Europe. This shoe to me is personal because it is the shoe I always 

aspired to have when I was growing up, I could never afford. It is almost like buying your first piece of art and to contribute to the history of that product for the generation of the now, it is an honor because it is more than

a sneaker,It is a design object, it is a design icon. It is just our shoe, it is one of our shoes. So we should be able to design it and have an opinion on it.

Behind The Design - A-COLD-WALL* x Nike TN98