Tuned To Perfection: A Personal History of the Nike Air Max Plus

There was no way that the twentieth anniversary of the NIKE AIR MAX PLUS was going to pass by without us offering a personal commentary. Shoe design is largely subjective, but whether you love or hate the TN, as it’s more commonly known today, its significance and importance in London is almost incomparable. There aren’t many products, let alone shoes, that can return to the shelves season after season without losing any of their magnetism. As the Air Max Plus enters its second decade, introducing itself to a younger, more unpredictable and perhaps more discerning customer base, it’s proved to have that same allure that it first showed all the way back in November 1998.

I first discovered the Air Max Plus in the summer of 1998. A tiny preview image in LoDown magazine had caught my eye and I found myself subconsciously looking for the shoe over the next few months. The striking Hyper Blue colourway was one thing, but I couldn’t work out if the shoe was shiny like patent leather, or whether it actually had a fading gradient across the toe box. I was hoping for the latter, as it reminded me of one of my favourite shoes from my childhood: the Omega Flame. I’d never been able to get a pair of Flames – at the time of release in 1983, my foot size was way too small to be wearing an adult running shoe. And that was if you could even find the Omega Flame in the shops. Other shoes such as the Air Flow and Air Current had found their way into my collection over the years, and there was something about the TN that reminded me of both of these groundbreaking designs.

Once I’d picked up my first pair of TNs in November 1998 (the original Hyper Blue men’s edition, which is featured on this page), I was hooked. It didn’t matter that the tongue always went to the side of your foot – if anything, it made the shoe even more comfortable to wear – and it was this unique (and probably unintentional) aspect that informed the name of the website that ended up becoming my vocation for many years: Crooked Tongues.

Crooked Tongues started off as a page on Spinemagazine – an online magazine that I started with a couple of people back in the summer of 1999. The music and graffiti pages were popular, but the page that featured my collection of TNs was bringing in a lot of traffic. As a result, we decided to build a separate site dedicated to trainers (the word ‘sneakers’ was still very much a US term back then), much to the amusement of our friends and colleagues at the time. From there, the site grew into a magazine and full ecommerce project, eventually becoming a multi-million pound business before eventually being sold to ASOS.

Whilst trends came and went over the years, my love for the TN stayed strong. I’d been trying my best to pick up every UK colourway that had dropped, but it was getting difficult to keep up. Visiting other countries presented opportunities (or problems, depending on who you were and if you were accompanying me on the trip) and I’d pick up both men’s and women’s colours if I could. I got to around 60 different colourways by the time I stopped buying, with a few doubles (and triples) of my very favourites. I liked some of the grid patterns and graphic applications, such as the lightning Olympic edition and the floral patterns, but my love for the TN started with the fade and that’s where it truly lies. The Verema olive green women’s colourway from 1999 is a favourite of mine, topped only by the Black/Desert-Red/Orange-Flash/Silver colourway (AKA the ‘Dracula’), which I first picked up via a seller in Canada.

The midsoles on many of my old favourites have disintegrated over the years, so I’m glad that I wore all of them before they perished. I can’t quite bring myself to throw away my original pair of Hyper Blue TNs, even though they leave a trail of foam-based crumbs across the floor whenever I dig them out.

You can check out the current TN selection at NIKE by clicking the banner below. But please be aware: the Air Max Plus can kick off an addiction like you wouldn’t believe…