Nike Air Yeezy 2 NRG 'Solar Red'
Colorway: Black/Black-Solar Red · Style code: 508214-006 · Release date: June 9, 2012 · Price: $3800 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Nike Air Yeezy 2 NRG 'Pure Platinum' (508214-010) · Nike Air Yeezy 2 SP 'Red October' (508214-660) · Nike Kyrie 6 By You 'Air Yeezy 2 - Solar Red' (CT1019-XXX-SOLAR) · Nike Kyrie 6 By You 'Air Yeezy 2 - Red October' (CT1019-XXX-RED-OCT)
The second Air Yeezy was a different exercise from the first. Nathan VanHook took the design lead, and where the 2009 shoe had borrowed heavily from Nike's existing parts bin, this one built its own vocabulary: reptile-scale texturing across the side panels, a heel counter moulded in rubber rather than stitched from leather, and Egyptian references worked into the tongue and the strap.
One thing did carry over. The tooling underneath comes from the Air Tech Challenge II, a 1990 tennis shoe, and the outsole glows in the dark as the first Air Yeezy's did.
It released on 9 June 2012 at $245 in two colorways, of which this is the darker. The palette echoes the black-and-pink version from 2009 closely enough to read as a deliberate callback, though the red here is hotter and the silhouette around it is far more sculpted.
Resale for the model reached figures that had no precedent for a Nike release at the time, which is part of why the line's ending two years later became a story in itself.