Nike - LUNAR MARIAH
To quote the sadly deceased Dirt Dog, "Me and Mariah go back like babies with pacifiers". The Air Mariah is a shoe close to our hearts. Nike's original Mariah shoes from the late '70s to early '80s represent the brand's commitment to real running, even getting the full Air midsole addition at the turn of the decade before a new look return for the franchise at the close of the decade. With its slimline fit, incredibly lightweight feel and distinctive use of midsole colour and neon, from eyebleeding oranges in 1988, to laser purples in the '90s and even blue spark for the 1996 editions.
A shoe well-regarded among hardcore runners and collectors in-the-know, the Air Mariah PR, and its sibling, the Duellist PR (Personal Record) are benchmark releases. For the Mariah PR, the 1990 white, royal blue and radiant pink variation is a true contender - not only did those intelligently designed panels inform 1991's Air Apparent, the casual runner's Mariah, with an extremely similar upper, and less aesthetically pleasing sole unit, but the Air 180 later in the year.
Given this upper's propensity for midsole transplant experiments, and featherweight legacy, this was, in many respects, a forefather to last year's brace of Lunar Foam performance pieces. Here it is with the ultra-responsive foam on the midsole in an appropriately hard-to-ignore shade, no-sew streamlining and extra ventilation, but elements like the grid pattern and mesh worked in, as is appropriate for the classic subject matter. We never saw this one coming, but as updates go, it's one of the best to date and far from the PR nightmare it could've been, working extremely well in this colourway.
