The Ten
In 2017, Virgil Abloh and Nike announced a project that would fundamentally alter the sneaker landscape. Titled The Ten, the collaboration took ten iconic Nike silhouettes and subjected them to Abloh's signature process of deconstruction and recontextualisation. The collection was divided into two thematic groups, Revealing and Ghosting, each approaching the source material from a different angle. But among the ten shoes, one stood apart from the rest.
The Air Jordan 1 was the crown jewel of The Ten. While every shoe in the collection carried Abloh's distinctive touch, the AJ1 resonated on a level that transcended sneaker culture. It was the shoe that people who had never heard of Off-White suddenly wanted. It was the shoe that made resellers recalibrate their understanding of demand. And it was the shoe that proved a designer could take the most recognisable silhouette in basketball history and make it feel entirely new.
The rollout was perfectly timed. Nike and Abloh controlled the narrative from the first leaked images through to the limited release, building anticipation with a precision that the industry had rarely seen. By the time pairs hit shelves, the Air Jordan 1 from The Ten was already a cultural event.
Design Revolution
What Abloh did to the Air Jordan 1 was not a redesign in the conventional sense. He did not change the shape, alter the proportions, or introduce new materials for their own sake. Instead, he pulled the shoe apart and let the seams show. The result was a sneaker that looked like it had been caught mid-construction, as though someone had interrupted the manufacturing process and sent it out into the world unfinished.
Exposed foam replaced the traditional padded collar. Stitching that would normally be hidden beneath overlays was pushed to the surface. Text appeared in quotation marks, labelling parts of the shoe with their functional names in a typeface that felt more like annotation than branding. The Swoosh, arguably the most sacred graphic element in sportswear, was detached and reattached at odd angles, held in place with visible stitching that made no attempt to be discreet.
None of this was accidental. Abloh's approach drew from his background in architecture and his ongoing engagement with conceptual art. He treated the Air Jordan 1 not as a finished product to be decorated but as a readymade to be interrogated. The quotation marks around words like AIR were not mere decoration. They were a device borrowed from critical theory, a way of asking whether the thing being named is really what it claims to be.
The shoe demanded that its wearer think differently about what they had on their feet. It was not enough to appreciate the colourway or the materials. You had to engage with the idea behind the design. That was new for sneakers, and it opened a door that the industry has been walking through ever since.
Cultural Shockwave
The impact of the Off-White x Air Jordan 1 was immediate and measurable. Limited quantities and extraordinary demand sent resale prices skyward from the moment of release. Pairs that retailed for $190 were trading for multiples of that within hours. The shoe became the benchmark against which every subsequent collaboration would be judged.
But the cultural shockwave extended far beyond resale markets. The Air Jordan 1 from The Ten changed what consumers expected from a sneaker collaboration. Before Abloh, most collaborations involved a new colourway or a premium material upgrade applied to an existing silhouette. After Abloh, that approach felt insufficient. Collaborators were now expected to bring a point of view, a design philosophy, a reason for the shoe to exist beyond novelty.
The influence rippled outward across the industry. Deconstructed aesthetics became widespread. Visible stitching, exposed foam, inside-out branding, and raw edges appeared on shoes from brands that had never previously embraced that approach. Some of these designs were thoughtful responses to the ideas Abloh had introduced. Others were surface-level imitations that borrowed the look without understanding the intent. Either way, the fingerprints of the Off-White x Air Jordan 1 were everywhere.
The UNC and Alaska
In 2018, Abloh followed the Chicago-coloured original with a powder-blue execution inspired by the University of North Carolina's colours. The shoe, which would later become known as the Alaska, pushed the deconstructed concept into a softer, more ethereal palette. Where the Chicago had been bold and confrontational, the UNC was quieter, more contemplative, but no less impactful.
The UNC was released as an EU exclusive, a distribution decision that only amplified its mystique. For years, it remained one of the most sought-after Jordans on the secondary market, a shoe that many knew by reputation but few had seen in person.
In 2026, the shoe returned under the banner of the Virgil Abloh Archive, rebranded as V.A.A. for Nike rather than Off-White. The rerelease marked a new chapter for the design, making it accessible to a global audience for the first time while honouring the creative legacy of its designer.
Lasting Impact
Nearly a decade after its debut, the Off-White x Air Jordan 1 remains the single most influential sneaker collaboration of its era. It did not merely produce a desirable shoe. It introduced a design vocabulary that reshaped the expectations of an entire industry.
Abloh demonstrated that a sneaker could be a critical object, a piece of design that asks questions rather than simply providing answers. The exposed construction, the annotative text, the deliberate imperfection: these were not aesthetic choices made in isolation. They were arguments about how we relate to the objects we consume.
The wave of deconstructed aesthetics that followed, from visible stitching to exposed foam to inside-out branding, is the most visible part of the shoe's legacy. But its deeper contribution is the idea that sneaker design can operate on multiple levels simultaneously, that a shoe can be wearable and intellectual, commercial and conceptual, familiar and entirely new.
That is what Virgil Abloh built with the Air Jordan 1. Not just a sneaker, but a new way of thinking about what sneakers can be.
