Tinker Hatfield unveiled an abundance of information pertaining to the Air Jordan 2012 at the launch event a couple of weeks ago. In addition to giving us his current, 7-sneaker rotation, we caught up with the mastermind at the event to discuss additional specifics on the Air Jordan 2012. With the “Year of the Dragon” Air Jordan 2012 set to hit retailers tomorrow, we share with you some of the conversation we had with Tinker Hatfield about the Air Jordan 2012’s evolution, its design inspiration, the comparison between the Air Jordan 2012 and the Nike Zoom Kobe VII and much more.
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Nice Kicks: How long did the entire Air Jordan 2012 design process take?
Tinker Hatfield: From my design sketches, it’s been about 18 months, but we were working on components before that because the engineering was so difficult.
Nice Kicks: Hand rubbed patina leather was incorporated on the Air Jordan 2011’s makeup, and the Air Jordan 2012 possesses a wingtip-like attribute on the toe box. Will high-quality, dress shoe aesthetics be a part of the Air Jordan line from now on?
Tinker Hatfield: It’s really a reaction to Michael himself. He really, really loves finely crafted dress shoes. The Air Jordan 2011 had hand rubbed leather with wax. That’s one of the reasons the 2011 costs so much in addition to each one being different. There’s a shoe company in Europe that does that, and Michael loves to buy those shoes. We wanted to do that in a basketball shoe, and he loved it.
Nice Kicks: Within the past year, we have seen the Air Jordan line and the Nike Kobe series go into a modular direction in terms of performance and supplying the wearer with options. Can we expect a consistent parallel between the two lines moving forward?
Tinker Hatfield: The Kobe shoes come out of the same design group as this shoe. So, as an example we have the Innovation Kitchen, and there’s a smaller group off of that in which we call the ‘Zoo’. That’s my area. Eric Avar works in there as well, and he does all of the Kobe stuff. I work in there, and I do the Jordan stuff. Mark Smith works in there, too. He’s doing the Dwyane Wade stuff. What’s really important about that is we all need to communicate a lot because each one of those pillars of basketball for us have to be different. They’re such big and important shoes for us, so we want to make sure LeBron is kind of leading in its own design direction, Kobe is going its own way and MJ’s too. We all work together to make sure everything is carefully separated out.
