story

My name is Martine Rose and I am a menswear designer based in London, and for the past two years we have been working with Nike on this special collaboration. Hi, my name is Shauni and I work with Martine as a senior designer. Hi, my name

is Gerald Sullivan, I am the design director of collaboration at Nike, focused on footwear. We chose to work with the Shox. In the UK the Shox are very closely associated with subcultures, with music and they have

a real cachet, and a resonance with youth culture I guess. Everything we do needs to have a deeper meaning, and for us, this was highlighting the inequality between men and women in sport. One thing that really struck me was: 

when you saw women arrive at international tournaments, compared to the men, the men would be coming off these amazing private jets, suited and booted, and when you looked at the contrast between them 

and the women's teams who came off in sweats and joggers, and in their own clothes, I thought it could be a great opportunity to really focus on women in football and then make our trainer 

that sort that it is almost like a smart shoe. Adding the height was a little difficult, we had to do a couple of different rounds to get it right. But that is kind of the fun part that we get to do, is figuring out all those engineering bits.

Shauni was like “Can we keep adding more height to the heel?" and we would come back on the Nike side and the engineering team, and they were like “I do not know if we can do it”, you know, “But let's do it, let’s keep trying”. It's great because it's still recognizable as a Shox, but just 

slightly different. It's not until you put your feet into the shoe that you realize the real height difference which I think is nice, it is not too extreme. So one of the challenges that we had was getting that toe 

to have that right triangular type of point and shape. We do not really make those kind of shoes, and so it was an amazing push for our team to be able to make a sneaker transformed into a dress shoe, 

which is what makes this project so awesome. We wanted to have a range of options, so we wanted something that felt really classic, so of course the black and the white Shox were obvious, but then we also wanted to reflect

the football elements, and so we were actually looking at football and goalie gloves. Everyone is going to be wearing this, mom, dad, nan, granddad. It is fun

Behind the Design

Shox MR4 x Martine Rose