The shoe that changed everything, according to designer D’Wayne Edwards, was the Nike Air Max 1.

It was like nothing the young Edwards had ever seen. The designer, Nike’s Tinker Hatfield, had been an architect before he became a shoe designer, and he modeled his 1987 Air Max 1 after a famous building: Paris’s Pompidou Center, which wore its piping and structure on the outside of the building, rather than hidden inside.

Hatfield used the same principles for the shoe to highlight a new, special technology: a puffy inflatable bladder filled with air that sat under the wearer’s heel. In the never-ending quest to build the best, lightest, strongest shoe for the athletes who were pushing the limits of human