Comme des Garçons Homme Plus x Nike Air Foamposite One 'Black'
Colorway: Black/Black/Black · Style code: DJ7952-001 · Release date: November 5, 2021 · Price: $781 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Comme des Garçons Homme Plus x Nike Air Foamposite One SP 'Cat Eye' (DJ7952-002) · Comme des Garçons Homme Plus x Nike Air Foamposite One 'White' (DJ7952-100)
Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garcons in Tokyo in 1969 and built its reputation on black, on unfinished seams and on garments that read as deliberately incomplete. When Paris first saw the work in the early 1980s, critics did not know what to do with it. Four decades on, that vocabulary is settled enough that applying it to a basketball shoe is a straightforward exercise.
The Air Foamposite One is an unusual candidate for it. Eric Avar's 1997 design replaced the stitched panels of a normal upper with a single moulded shell, a manufacturing approach that had already removed almost every seam before Kawakubo got near it. What the Homme Plus treatment added was subtraction: black across the shell, black on the midsole, black on the outsole, leaving the wavy circular pattern moulded into the surface as the only thing catching light.
Branding is deliberately small. A mini Swoosh is embroidered at the lateral forefoot, the Homme Plus name sits on the heel tab, and Penny Hardaway's 1 Cent mark stays on the herringbone outsole where nobody sees it standing up.
The shoe was unveiled at the label's Fall/Winter 2021 menswear show in Tokyo and reached retail on 5 November 2021 at 520 dollars, well above what a general-release version of the model cost.