![]() ![]() (Size 13, if you’re tempted.) “Jordan leads the way for the rest of the streetwear market,” says Brahm Wachter, vice president, head of streetwear and modern collectables, at Sotheby’s. Those have an estimate of $2m to $4m, making them highly likely to be the most expensive ever auctioned. This week, bidding opens on a pair of signed Air Jordan XIII “The Last Dance” trainers, worn by Jordan during the 1998 NBA finals. In 2021, Sotheby’s auction house sold the earliest known Jordan/Nike shoes for $1.47m. Everyday people started buying them, particularly Jordan 1s. White women started buying Jordans for the first time. We went from £1.9m revenue to £45m last year – £24m of that was Jordan shoes. “We went from eight of us to 180 in a year-and-a-half. “ The Last Dance changed our lives,” says Robert Franks, co-founder and chief operating officer of Kick Game, a seller of exclusive, rare and sold-out trainers, with outlets in six of the UK’s biggest cities, plus Milan. It’s not only Nike and Michael Jordan who have benefited – the Air Jordan shoe has changed the market for both vintage and resale trainers and helped cement them as collectibles on a par with the art world.īen Affleck plays the Nike chief Phil Knight in Air. Based on that figure, its namesake would have pulled in $256.1m from a decades-old licensing deal without lifting a finger, let alone a basketball – more than double the amount from his entire NBA career. Last year, the Jordan brand made Nike $5.1bn, up 70% from 2020. Coinciding with twin ramifications of lockdown – a captive audience, and a hunger for comfier clothes – it drew a global audience of 24 million and turbo-boosted interest in its star. In 2020, Netflix broadcast The Last Dance, the 10-part documentary that followed Jordan’s career in compelling detail. Today there are 37 Air Jordan styles available, not including countless colourways, collaborations, limited editions and retro Jordans. Though Jordan retired for the third and final time in 2003, Nike has continued to introduce new models under his name each year. ![]() Last but very much not least, he was an astonishing athlete – as is obvious even to people with no interest in sport, much less US basketball. His rise from humble beginnings – a North Carolina boy who didn’t make the grade for his high-school team, the son of a bank employee mother, and a General Electric plant supervisor father, later murdered – made him the embodiment of the American Dream. Jordan has been called the biggest pop culture hero in American history – someone who transcended not just his sport but race, class and generations. The Air Jordan brand sits at the heart of today’s multibillion-pound trainer collecting boom. Today, unworn Jordan 1s sell for north of $20,000 (£16,000) on the resale site StockX. You’d have done well to hang on to a pair. Instead, backed by clever marketing that suggested the NBA had banned the shoes for being too colourful (it hadn’t), it shipped 1.5 million in the first six weeks. ![]() It expected to sell 100,000 pairs in the first year. Nike officially released the Air Jordan 1 sneakers to the public on 1 April 1985 at the price of $64.95. Photograph: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images Michael Jordan and his mother Deloris Jordan in 1988. ![]()
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