Nike HUF x Air Max 90 Premium 'Hufquake'
Colorway: Neutral Grey/White/Military Blue · Style code: 312334-011 · Release date: January 2007 · Price: $1414 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Nike Air Max 90 Premium (312334-001) · Nike Air Max 90 Sertig Pack Sneakers (312334-061) · Nike Air Max 90 Premium 'Clerks Pack' (312334-231) · Nike Air Max 90 Premium 'Running Man' (312334-311) · HUF x Nike Dunk Low Priority 'Hufquake' (314771-801)
HUF created the Hufquake graphic in 2006 to mark a century since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a fracture pattern meant to read as split concrete. The print first appeared on a Nike Air Force 1 and a Dunk that year, then moved onto the Air Max 90 and the Air Max 1 in 2007. On this pair the cracking runs across the upper in Neutral Grey and white, with Military Blue filling the accents and darker panels. The graphic covers the panelled sections rather than sitting as a patch, so the fracture lines and the shoe's own seams interact.
The result is one of the more conceptually direct sneaker collaborations of the mid 2000s: a local brand marking a local event, applied to a running silhouette that already made its structure visible through its panel layout and exposed Air unit. The Air Max 90 version is the harder of the two Air Max pairs to find today, and original examples show their age in the print, which was applied to materials that have had nearly two decades to shift.