Why are Air Jordans so valuable?

So what is it about the Air Jordan that makes it so special? The backstory alone, the subject of a new film, Air, directed by and starring Ben Affleck alongside Matt Damon and Viola Davis, was unprecedented. At the time that Nike approached Jordan, in 1984, he was still a rookie playing at the University of Carolina. Still, they had to fight to convince him to sign with them, as Jordan himself was keen to sign with Adidas and at the time Nike was a struggling brand. Shoe designer and Nike legend Peter C Moore was brought in, reportedly sketching the design on the back of a napkin, and the first Air Jordan was born. It was the first of 35 different Air Jordan designs that have been released in the years since.

Jordan's athletic prowess is clearly a major factor in the shoe's enduring reputation. "Jordan's cultural cachet continues to increase even beyond his playing years," says Drew Haines, merchandising director of sneakers and collectibles at StockX, the online marketplace and resale site for streetwear and sneakers. "All this time has passed, and really no one has reached the level that he was able to reach in his career."

Unmatched, too, is the mythology that developed around the man himself, and the way he managed to spring out of the court and into popular culture. "For many people it wasn't Christopher Reeve that made you think a man could fly, it was Michael Jordan, and he had no strings doing it," says Jian DeLeon, former editorial director of sneaker and streetwear magazine Highsnobiety. "He was actually doing it in real life over and over, and these were the shoes he was doing it in." Plus, Air Jordans "are eminently more wearable than Superman's cape or the underwear outside the pants." The trainers were, DeLeon tells BBC Culture, "a representation of a wearable manifestation of human greatness."

A lot of the marketing around the shoes was more like that of a car promotion, says DeLeon, who's not sure of the exact number of pairs he owns  – he acquired five or six in the past month, and has somewhere in the 100s in total. In 1989, adverts were released, "very Spike Lee style", as DeLeon puts it, in which Lee appears as Mars Blackmon, his character from his film She's Gotta Have It. In the ads, he questions Jordan on what makes him the best player in the universe, and repeatedly says, "it's gotta be the shoes!" Teaming up with Lee on the adverts was a savvy move. It was, says DeLeon, unprecedented for any brand to tap into the cultural zeitgeist like that. "I think that was the moment that, 'ok, these are a status symbol,'" he says.

The shoe was initially banned by the NBA because of its red-and-black colour scheme at a time when the organisation stipulated that players' footwear had to be predominantly white. This inevitably only created a rebellious mystique around it – it is the shoe's ability to take colour that might also have helped in its long-lasting popularity. "Whether it was the toe box or the contrast on the swoosh or the collar, the way that you could design it and make colours pop was just eminently noticeable in a way that was relatively new to sneakers, and I think that was part of it," says DeLeon.

Cult appeal

Despite not owning any himself – "I'm very much a Nike Airforce guy" – Haines also nods to the design itself: "The cleanliness of the model, the way the panels are constructed and the way that they can apply hundreds or thousands of different colours to that, and different materials and keep it fresh, I think it's a versatile sneaker, for men, for women, for kids."

There have, of course, been other athletes with signature shoe lines before. DeLeon points to Adidas Stan Smiths, endorsed by the legendary US tennis player of the same name, as well as the signature basketball sneaker the Converse Chuck Taylor which, according to DeLeon was the "weapon of choice for athletes in the NBA" at the time the first Air Jordans were released. "But what made the Jordan line particularly interesting is the athlete has always managed to stay upfront and have more relevance than the shoe itself."

Often, after an athlete stops playing, their memory gets usurped by the trainer. When Smith collaborated with the late influential Parisian boutique, Colette and Adidas during the reintroduction of that shoe, which became the go-to trainer for fashion types in 2010s,  Smith apparently opened the door to Colette, and there were "so many kids just rushing past him. They didn't recognise him. A book about the man and the trainer is literally called, Some People Think I'm a Shoe. "I don't think that's been the case with Jordans,” says DeLeon.

It didn't hurt that three years ago, Netflix's The Last Dance had basketball novices, who barely knew what a slam dunk was, gripped as they watched the 10-part documentary series charting the rise of the Chicago Bulls with Jordan at the helm. StockX saw an incredible spike in interest around that time in the summer of 2020. 

Air Jordans are not without their controversies. 2020 documentary One Man and His Shoes delved into the way Nike aggressively marketed the shoes to the kids who could least afford them, as one reviewer wrote, "controlling the supply of Air Jordans as carefully as De Beers controlled the supply of diamonds, artificially assigning extreme value and desirability to the shoes".

It is no surprise that they were also the sneaker that arguably first kicked off sneaker culture as we now know it: "It's pretty clear to me at least that the Jordan 1 sneaker itself is probably the sneaker that started it all," says Haines. "It's the sneaker that started this feverish sneaker culture that has existed now for the better part of probably 20 years."

They also, says DeLeon, "revolutionised street fashion. It was a shoe that had a cult appeal, you would see them on the street and if you were part of the tribe you could easily identify what they were, you could connect with people over them. That was the beginnings of street culture, knowing these codes, being able to connect over them," he says. They stood for something: "in the 80s or 90s if you saw Jordans on someone's feet there was a high chance that you could have a conversation starting with the shoes and leading into other similar interests, whether it was hip-hop, whether it was sports, whether it was burgeoning street rap brands like [hip-hop record label] QC, [Jordans] were like part of an underground uniform of this burgeoning style tribe."

While then they might have been cutting edge, now part of their appeal is nostalgia. For DeLeon, "I have an old Blur T-shirt or an Anime T-shirt that I'll never get rid of, [it's] the same thing with Jordans."

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