Nike ZoomX Vaporfly NEXT% 'Blue Ribbon Sports'
Colorway: White/Team Royal/Orange Peel/White · Style code: CU4844-100 · Release date: January 25, 2020 · Price: $239 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Nike ZoomX VaporFly NEXT% 'Sail' (CT9133-100) · Nike ZoomX Vaporfly Next% 'Black' (AO4568-001) · Nike ZoomX VaporFly Next% 3 'Prototype' (DX7957-100) · Nike ZoomX Vaporfly NEXT% 2 'Rawdacious' (DJ5457-100) · Nike ZoomX VaporFly Next% 4 'Ghost' (HF6414-001)
Before it was Nike, the company was Blue Ribbon Sports, importing Japanese running shoes and selling them out of small storefronts. This Vaporfly turns that history into graphics: hand-scribbled text and drawings across the white Vaporweave upper, including the street address of the Santa Monica shop as it stood in the late 1960s.
The contrast is the point. The shoe underneath was the most technologically aggressive thing Nike had made, a ZoomX foam midsole with a full-length carbon fibre plate running through it, designed to limit the energy lost when the toes bend at push-off. It was released in January 2020 at $250, in the window when the Vaporfly was rewriting marathon records and drawing regulatory attention for it.
Putting a small-scale importing origin story on the outside of a shoe built to break world records is a fairly direct piece of framing, and the release stood out in a line otherwise dominated by neon.