crooked tongues magazine News Features

The Nike Air Max 97 is the shoe that became ubiquitous during those early British Blair years of optimism, was embraced by our European neighbours, then seemed to be pretty much dumped by the masses in favour of 87s and 120s. We love it, but we have to concede that, given the RRP, we’d generally opt for other Maxes over this one — it reeks of a certain era, when expensive denim was a novelty and we drenched ourselves in Tommy Hilfiger fragrances. But as time's gone on, we've started to get nostalgic for more excessive things (blame the recession) and there's a certain transitional aesthetic at work that merges basics with technical designs. It's a testament to the Air Max 97's departure from the 96 (amazing shoe, but it looks it's age) that it slots into the current gym-dandy chino and Free or Lunar look pretty slickly.

It's all in the Hyperfuse application to the upper. Where some shoes might be good when they're updated with Fuse, they still look like a merger of old and new, but the Air Max 97 Hyperfuse implements a technology that would have been at home on the reflective panels of the original. This Dynamic Blue variation is a very blue shoe — there's no respite from the blueness either. The upper is entirely blue and beyond the transparency of air bubble, it's blue in there too. We'd stay out of Piru neighbourhoods in these and avoid them if you've got the faintest aversion to this colour. Try to match them up and you'll look like Mystique or one of the Blue Man Group. We recommend letting these deliver a blast of contrast into your everyday wears and they're on sale in the Crooked Tongues store right now.