Nike Opens Its Massive Archive at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design
“Nike: Form Follows Motion” brings rarely seen prototypes, original sketches and five decades of sneaker history to NYC.
Summary
“Nike: Form Follows Motion” traces the brand from early running experiments to Air, Flyknit and Vaporfly.
Archival prototypes, sketches and cultural ephemera show how Nike sneakers moved from performance tools into music, fashion and street culture.
Before the Swoosh became shorthand, there were sketches, prototypes and plenty of trial and error. “Nike: Form Follows Motion,” now on view at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, looks back at more than 50 years of the brand, from Bill Bowerman’s early waffle-sole experiments to Air Max, Jordans, Flyknit and Vaporfly. Originally organized by the Vitra Design Museum, the show pulls from Nike’s internal archive of more than 200,000 objects.
Waffle Trainers, Air Force 1s, Air Jordans and Vaporflys all make an appearance, but there’s more to look at than the familiar footwear hits we’ve written so much about. Early samples, prototypes, sketches and old testing equipment show how some of these ideas actually started, often looking pretty far removed from the finished products we know now.
The exhibition starts with Nike’s running roots before moving into the Air era. Frank Rudy’s early testing machine and air-bag prototypes are here, alongside material tracing Nike’s expansion into basketball, tennis, football and skateboarding. Michael Jordan, Serena Williams and LeBron James appear throughout, as do its legendary designers including Tinker Hatfield, Diane Katz and Eric Avar.
Things get a little more technical from there. Nike Free, Flyknit and Vaporfly lead into the brand’s work around biomechanics, material research and the Nike Sport Research Lab. It’s a side of Nike that tends to get buried underneath the bigger cultural moments, but it explains a lot about how the shoes ended up looking the way they do.
And for the last part of the show, it moves further away from pure performance and into the wider cultural domain. Fifty footwear examples sit alongside music videos, collaborations and other material tracing Nike through streetwear, fashion, music and sneaker cosigns. The Air Force 1, for example, became inseparable from hip-hop, while the Dunk found another life through skateboarding long after its basketball origins. Some sneakers became important for reasons that had very little to do with what they were originally designed for.
The best parts of “Form Follows Motion” are probably the unfinished ones. The weird prototypes, old sketches and technical experiments offer a better look at Nike than another lineup of famous sneakers. You get to see some of the thinking before shoes became Swoosh icons.
“Nike: Form Follows Motion” is on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York through March 7, 2027.
Museum of Arts and Design
2 Columbus Circle
New York, NY 10019
