story

Hello. Talk to me. Talk to me. It's been 30 years. It's been 40 years. Chris!

Chris, so you don't hear me now, right? You don't hear me? So you not going to say a (bleep) thing? We're not going to re-release this shoe after 40 years for you to sit back and not tell anyone the story.

Hey, Field General, it's me, Nike by Chris Gibbs, and I'm here to talk to you today about the Field General by Nike. Hey y'all, Jamie Benson, head designer, Union Los Angeles. I'm Chris Gibbs, Creative Director and owner of UNION...

...Los Angeles. Welcome to Behind the Design. This collection is different than most and I've been proudly telling people the main reason is because it's the first UNION/Nike collab...

...that I didn't design, and you actually designed it. True. And you killed it. Thank you. And you're going to put me out of a job now. The idea was to take the OG Field General from the '80s, which always had a place in my heart...

...as being... I don't know, I always saw it as a really dope design shoe. I grew up in the '80s. I'm a '80s baby. And, yeah, there were divisions between skaters who are...

...anti-jock, sports and then sports, anti-skater. I made the football team. I probably made it wearing a pair of Chucks, just what I had. The coach was like, "Y'all got to go get shoes." So me and my mom...

...went to the mall. If I remember correctly, there were three options, you know what I mean? And the Field General is the one that I gravitated to. I actually wanted to create layers, to play with the fabrics, to play with all the different fabrics. So what I did was like...

"All right, I'm going to take multiple generations of the Field General and then use those layers." It was like the toe box is two different Field Generals laid together. The heel cup is two different Field Generals. And then what I liked, what we all liked then, was the mesh.

The mesh was just fly because it wasn't like a fabric that was on shoes when we came up. So it was like, "How do we make that mesh fire?" Other Nike shoes we've done have been, take the Cortez, and we've kind of been near the Cortez or we've been near the Dunk.

But this shoe, we were allowed to make a new outsole, which is- Fire. Rare. Absolutely. And that gave us a lot more agency to really play with the shoe. And I think you killed it, man. My favorite...

...part of this shoe is the midsole. And in particular, if you get really close, there's a four millimeter ledge, and that was based off of an old '70s era... and so...

...we put a lot of energy into the ledge and we got down to the millimeter, like how many millimeters can we get away with? Right. I can push it out right here. That's by far my favorite part of this shoe. Got to know the ledge. Field General, to me, symbolizes...

...the perfect balance of old and new. We took an on-field cleat and made a streetwear fashion shoe. Thanks for watching Behind the Design... on the UNION x Field General. Peace.

Behind the Design: Nike Field General x UNION