Love Jordan Sneakers? Then Meet the Remarkable Designer Behind Them

"Right after I finished the Air Jordan 11, I showed Michael photos of the final version. The first thing he said was, 'This is so beautiful, people could wear it to their own wedding.'"

To mark its 30th anniversary and promote the brand, Jordan has set up a "Jordan Flight Headquarters" at the Bund Origin, a cluster of historic buildings in Shanghai. The Zhongshi Building, built in 1929, is now an exhibition space bearing the stamp of both the Jordan brand and Michael Jordan himself. It opened to the public in early October for a two-week run. At dusk, the Jumpman leaping across the building's facade stands out against the night sky.

In 30 years, Jordan has grown into the most successful sneaker brand, and much of the credit goes to Nike designer Tinker Hatfield. The Air Jordan line became popular, and even grew into a cultural product of sorts, largely because of how he reinvented sneaker design. Hatfield came to Shanghai to help promote Jordan's celebration. We'll look around the exhibition space first, then hear his stories about Jordan sneakers.

The exterior of the "Flight Headquarters"

First, the details inside the Flight Headquarters, which will help you understand Michael Jordan a little better

The Flight Headquarters is small. Of its three main areas, exhibition, experience and retail, the exhibition area is the one worth your attention. It shows photographs and artworks about Jordan alongside actual Air Jordan sneakers.

The first highlight is the Walter Iooss photography gallery. Iooss, an American photographer who spent many years at Sports Illustrated, is known for his sports photography, and many of his pictures of Jordan became classics. The gallery shows a series of his classic photographs of Jordan, displayed in Greater China for the first time.

The photos record many memorable moments in Jordan's career. At the All-Star Slam Dunk Contest in the 1987/1988 season, he took off from the free-throw line and dunked, beating Dominique Wilkins to defend his title. In 1998, after the Chicago Bulls beat the Jazz for the championship, a delighted Jordan lit a cigar in the locker room to celebrate his second three-peat.

In 2005, already retired, Jordan showed the photographer his injured right hand, the damage to his fingers plain to see. Many visitors can't resist holding up their own hands to compare them with, and pose for photos beside, the hand that achieved so much on the basketball court.

The "Walter Iooss photography gallery"

Also worth noting is the photo Iooss took in 1986 of Jordan changing his shoes in the locker room before a game (the rightmost picture above). It is said to have introduced a camera angle now common in sports photography.

The second highlight is a pair of brightly colored "Wall of Jordan" murals, one static and one dynamic; the dynamic one shows the artist Michael Lau at work creating them. The Wall of Jordan has a strong street-graffiti feel, gathering many drawings about basketball, the Jordan brand and Jordan the man. Its design was in fact inspired by work from ordinary consumers and fans, who submitted their own Jordan stories through the We Are Jordan interactive project on the official website.

"Wall of Jordan"

The third highlight sits at the center of the exhibition space and is the main display of the Flight Headquarters: the "Hall of Greatness." A thick white column glows with light. It works like a large cabinet: its drawers and shelves hold Air Jordan sneakers, along with photographs and sportswear tied to Jordan and the Jordan brand, which together tell the story of key moments for both at different times.

This may be the most "expensive" and most interesting area in the Flight Headquarters. Sneakers, after all, are what Jordan sells. Besides the classic Air Jordans of every generation, you can see the Air Ship sneakers Jordan wore in his NBA debut; the national-team uniform he wore as a member of the "Dream Team" at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics; the No. 12 jersey he wore on Valentine's Day 1990 after his own jersey went missing; and a Wheaties box with Jordan on the cover. These keepsakes and the stories behind them make the god of basketball more vivid in visitors' minds.

Even the glass partition separating the "Hall of Greatness" from the other areas was specially designed. It carries hand-drawn images of Jordan and the Jordan brand, one of the exhibition's pleasant surprises.

The "Hall of Greatness"

The Air Jordan 3 on display in the "Hall of Greatness," with designer Tinker Hatfield's sketches in the background

Tinker Hatfield, the man who changed basketball shoe design

What most visitors to the Flight Headquarters probably care about is the Air Jordan sneakers themselves. The line is the core of the Jordan brand, is regarded as the high point of basketball shoe design, and is still being reissued today. Yet many fans and buyers don't know the designer behind these classics, and often ask, "Who is Tinker Hatfield?"

Tinker Hatfield

Over the past 30 years, Hatfield has helped design many Air Jordan sneakers, including the Air Jordan 3 through 15, the Air Jordan 20, and the famous Air Mag from the film Back to the Future. It's fair to say he changed the look of athletic shoes, brought in new technical experiments, and even changed the way basketball shoes are designed.

The Air Jordan 3, which Hatfield designed, was probably the first signature shoe that truly expressed an athlete's personality. From then on, the signature shoes he made for Jordan carried not only his own observations of Jordan and his ideas about sneakers as a designer, but also the player's own personality and ideas. Designing a signature shoe gradually became a process of working together with the athlete.

Jordan himself has said that he talked with Hatfield often, telling him how much support and weight he needed in a shoe and how it should feel when he moved, and giving him prompt feedback on how the shoes performed in games.

In a way, Hatfield was an eyewitness and "insider" to Jordan's career, living through each of its stages alongside him: the three-peat, the departure and comeback, the final retirement. You can see Michael Jordan change through the shoes. And many of the techniques in today's athlete signature shoes were inspired by the Air Jordans he designed.

Hatfield also draws inspiration from many fields outside sports. Animals, architecture, music, cars, even fighter jets and lawn mowers have all found their way into his designs, giving sneaker design (and its aesthetics) new angles. The Air Jordan 13, for example, has a distinctive outsole shaped like a cat's paw, reflective-fiber stitching on the upper and a holographic "cat's eye" on the side; its design was inspired by a panther in the jungle. By coincidence, when Jordan saw it he was amazed, and told Hatfield that as a child his nickname had been "Black Cat."

The Air Jordan 13, inspired by the panther

Air Jordan 3, 4, 11 and the Air Mag

Hatfield says he keeps an open mind and is always changing, but "the goal of the design is always to tell Michael's story, and the story of the Jordan brand." We talked with him about sneaker design and some of the funnier moments between him and Michael Jordan.

Q: QDaily

A: Tinker Hatfield

Q: Many people now see Air Jordans as fashion. When you design them, do you set out to make them look fashionable? How do you balance form and function?

A: The most important thing in designing an Air Jordan is making sure the shoe always performs better. Sometimes a design is considered fashionable simply because it's different, or because someone important wears it, like Michael Jordan. The Air Jordan 11 is a good example. When it came out, it was a new kind of basketball shoe, unlike anything else on the market. And I didn't set out to make it look fashionable. That intention was truly zero.

We just wanted new performance, so we added carbon fiber, gave it a more durable outsole, and chose materials carefully to make the shoe lighter... In short, it had many better design elements, and that made it the best basketball shoe. To design a shoe like that I did look for inspiration in many things, but the process was never fashion design. It was the new materials and the new design language that made it fashionable in the end.

Q: The group Boyz II Men once showed up at an awards ceremony in Air Jordan 11s and white suits. Kids today also love wearing Air Jordans away from the court, even on formal occasions. What do you make of that?

A: Right after I finished the Air Jordan 11, I showed Michael photos of the final version. The first thing he said was, "This is so beautiful, people could wear it to their own wedding." I couldn't believe it: "Are you serious?" A few months later Boyz II Men wore the shoe to an awards ceremony. The next day Michael called me and said, "See, I told you so." He was absolutely right.

I think these shoes can feel both fashionable and formal now because people have become more open, and more tolerant about "what is appropriate to wear and what isn't." When I went to Paris many years ago, nobody on the street wore sneakers, because in Parisian tradition it was improper to wear fairly technical athletic shoes on the street. Now everyone wears them, and the most fashionable women in Paris wear Nike and Air Jordan too.

Anyway, I think the world keeps changing, and the way we design sneakers has also changed people's old ideas about "what counts as appropriate dress." We used to think materials that were too shiny couldn't go on the surface of a sneaker. Now nobody sees a problem with it, and you can wear them with dresses and suits.

Tinker Hatfield talks about the Air Jordan 11

Q: If you were to design a sneaker for a particular woman, who would she be, and what would the shoe look like?

A: When I design, I always look for a muse. If I'm designing a women's shoe, I first picture a specific woman and then design for her. That has always been a smart way to simplify the process; designing shoes for Michael Jordan was easier than designing for thousands of basketball players. So I try to understand this woman: what she's like, what she likes to wear, what she does, where she wants to go. Then I draw up a set of guidelines and look within them for appealing ideas to work with.

Q: I hear you have a new project, designing Hayward Field at the University of Oregon. I know you started out as an architect. How does it feel to return to architecture? What can an architect and a sneaker designer learn from each other?

A: Actually, I never stopped designing buildings. I've designed many houses and vacation homes, sometimes for my own family. And I've been busy designing all sorts of other projects. It may look as if I've just come back to architecture, probably because of all the publicity around Hayward Field. It is an important place and a big project, after all. But I never left architecture.

So for me there's no big change of identity. I haven't changed; I've always done both architecture and sneaker design. I also design furniture, and now I'm designing motorcycles. I think it's good for a designer to spread into as many fields as possible.

Q: You said in earlier interviews that what you most wanted to design was a motorcycle, and now you're actually doing it.

A: Ha ha, that's right. I love riding motorcycles, and one reason is that Michael Jordan used to tease me. I used to ride a scooter, and he'd say I looked like a little girl and should toughen up! So I went and bought a real motorcycle, and now I have four or five at home. Now he doesn't ride anymore. It's my turn to laugh at him.

Q: Now that you're designing motorcycles, is there anything you've never tried and would like to design now?

A: There's a lot I've never designed. I'd like to make music. That's a form of design too, a creative process. It's hard to draw a clear line between different kinds of creative work, like literary writing and the reporting you're doing right now. For me they all come from the same kind of thinking. So I'd like to try making some music. I'd really like to be a surfer, a motorcycle rider and a musician.

Q: So you're quite the adventurer?

A: Ha, I'd say I'm reckless. I like taking risks, but I always end up going a bit too far.

Image credits: photographed on site, Nike, Walter Iooss