Nike Air Force 1 Low Canvas 'NYC Editions: Procell'
Colorway: Muslin/Muslin-Desert Ore · Style code: CJ0691-100 · Release date: December 31, 2019 · Price: $240 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Nike Air Force 1 Low Luxe Se Oregon Ducks (JF5453-001) · PS Nike Force 1 Low (IQ7192-100) · Nike Force 1 Low (IQ7193-100) · Nike Air Force 1 Low (IZ1990-900) · Nike Air Force 1 '07 (IX7257-133)
The Air Force 1 arrived in 1982 as Bruce Kilgore's design and as the first basketball shoe built around a Nike Air unit, but the part of its history this release is answering happened afterward and off the court. The model was worn so heavily in Harlem that the neighborhood renamed it: Uptowns. New York did not adopt the shoe so much as annex it.
So when Nike built its NYC Editions pack in 2019 with Procell, a vintage curator working out of the city, the brief was not to put a skyline on a sneaker. Procell's premise was that New York functions as a blank canvas for whoever turns up in it, and the shoe takes that literally: the upper is canvas, in an undyed muslin tone, with thick exposed stitching left visible the way it would be on an unfinished piece rather than tidied away.
The branding is deliberately handmade in feel. The tongue patch is painted rather than woven, with 'New York City' across it in cursive, and an embroidered NYC graphic covers the heel. At $110 it sat at standard Air Force 1 pricing, which suited a shoe whose whole argument was that the blank version is the interesting one.