Tom Sachs x NikeCraft Mars Yard
Colorway: Natural/Sport Red-Maple · Style code: 519329-160 · Release date: May 16, 2012 · Price: $8325 · Availability: Available now
More colorways: Nikecraft x Tom Sachs I.S.R.U Uniform Apparel Collection (DC5702-334) · Tom Sachs x NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe 'Archive' (DA6672-700) · Tom Sachs x NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe 'Studio' (DA6672-200) · Tom Sachs x NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe 'Brown' (DA6672-201) · Tom Sachs x NikeCraft Wmns General Purpose 'Participation' (IV5773-001)
Sachs studied architecture, worked in Frank Gehry's furniture shop, and built a sculpture practice out of making things by hand from materials that already existed: plywood, foamcore, hardware-store parts, with the joins and the labour left visible. He calls the approach bricolage, and after an expensively outsourced piece underperformed in 1998 he stopped outsourcing altogether.
The Space Program works began in 2007 as full-scale recreations of NASA missions built entirely in his studio: lunar modules, mission control, Tyvek spacesuits, complete with details no real agency would have permitted. In 2012 he expanded it to Mars at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, adding a rover and terraforming apparatus.
NikeCraft came out of that project, and the brief was equipment rather than product. The Mars Yard uses Vectran (a fibre used in airbags on Mars landings) with maple suede over it, a sport red swoosh and pull tabs at heel and tongue, and a Free outsole modified with denser foam and more aggressive traction. It released in May 2012 at $385.