Nike Air Zoom Maxfly Proto 'White Total Orange'
Colorway: White/Black/Total Orange · Style code: DH9804-100 · Price: $950 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Nike Air Zoom Maxfly 'Rawdacious' (DJ5261-100) · Nike Air Zoom Maxfly 'Racer Blue' (DH5359-400) · Nike Air Zoom Maxfly 'Mint Foam' (DR9905-300) · Nike Air Zoom Maxfly 2 'Prototype' (HF7643-100) · Nike Air Zoom Maxfly 2 'Denim Turquoise' (HQ1843-400)
Proto is a look as much as a build. Nike has long used plain white uppers with a single loud accent to signal a shoe still being tested, borrowing the visual language of samples and wear-test pairs, and the treatment has been applied to finished retail products often enough to become a style of its own. Underneath is the sprint spike the company built for events from one hundred to four hundred metres, and it carries the recipe that had already reorganised distance running: a stiff full-length carbon plate over ultralight foam, here combined with Zoom Air units front and rear. It reached the market ahead of the delayed Tokyo Games, where sprinters wearing it took the men's and women's hundred metres. Total orange against white is the only decoration the shoe carries; no release date is recorded for this pair.