I’ll admit it: I’m not a sporty person. I do like watching some sports, but when I was around 11 years old I developed a total disinterest in sport as I hated my PE teacher with a vengeance. Apart from being a miserable bastard and obliging everybody in my class to play volleyball (which I hated), she criticised me for taking ballet classes, ballet being in her ignorant little mind not an elegant art, but something useless. Childhood traumas aside, I also hate sportswear especially if it’s produced by huge brands who exploit poor countries. I thought these reasons where enough to turn into a catastrophe my interviews with Nike Global Design Director Jesse Leyva and Senior Apparel Designer Jarrett Reynolds.
I guess designing innovative sportswear for our fast-paced market and for huge corporations can be a tricky business. But Leyva and Reynolds proved me you can still be true to yourself and express your style while contributing to developing the future of an established brand. 
Leyva’s passion for sneakers, developed as a kid, helped him landing his job at Nike. “I am the first design director without a design degree at Nike, which sounds rather crazy,” he told me in that occasion. “I have a degree in communications and design and, from an early stage when I got hired at the company, people started noticing that I understood colour and layout very well, so the marketing and design staff would give me stacks of illustrations and ask me to colour them in.” Leyva has been working at Nike for 11 years. When he first started, Richard Clarke, the company’s Global Creative Sportswear Director, explained him he would work on two types of products: shoes destined to become instant hits and shoes that maybe would never catch on, but that would be used as a sort of foundation for the future. At the time, Leyva struggled to understand what Clarke meant, but things became clearer when he worked with legendary Nike designer Tinker Hatfield on redeveloping the Trainer 1, “restoring” it and trying to make it better. This is the main concept behind the 2008 Air Max 90 Current and Air Max 90 Flywire: both retain the main characteristics of Tinker’s Air Max 90, such as cushioning and stability, but lightweight innovation has been introduced in the former, while the latter fuses the technology behind suspension bridges into the shoe design.
Suspension bridges weren’t the only pieces of architecture that inspired Leyva and his team. Further ideas were developed from interior design, furniture and architectural wonders such as Beijing’s futuristic Bird’s Nest stadium with its exposed steel bands. A year and a half ago Leyva was lucky enough to take a trip to Beijing. At the time he had no expectations about going there, he thought that maybe he would have found something interesting but he wasn’t too sure. “I was on a tour bus with a group of designers – Nike is kind of notorius for big tour buses – and we started noticing this thing from a distance," he recounted. "The bus started getting quieter and quieter as we got closer and we realised we were in front of something very inspirational. At Nike we think of ‘form follows function’, but, in the case of this stadium, the function followed the form.” 
Amazed at this minimalist structure, and inspired by Tinker and Bruce Kilgore’s one-on-one basketball game called “Scissors” that consisted in cutting away part of their shoes and seeing how minimal they could get, Leyva and his team came up with the lightweight and graphically striking AF1 Supreme Max, also known as the “Black Widow”. 
Beijing also inspired the Nike Dunk High Supreme ’08, characterised by a multicoloured effect and digitally printed octagons that symbolically call to mind the fascination of Chinese culture with the number 8, and the Dunk Hi “Quilted Patent” Pack in the colours of the 5 Olympic Rings.
Since it was founded 36 years ago, Nike created an enormous heritage not only for what regards footwear, but also apparel: one of the company’s most iconic pieces is the Windrunner. Designed by Geoff Hollister in 1979, and worn at the 1980 Olympic Track and Field Qualifying Trials in Eugene, Oregon, the Windrunner has recently undergone the re-mastering and remixing treatment. The so-called “cape suit” Hollister created inspired by the capes worn by the Nootka tribe, is now available in two versions, the Flywire Windrunner, with four angled lines on the right and left sides of the front and back, and four lines on both sleeves representing the start of the Olympic Games (080808), and the technically advanced Laser Runner, a minimalist piece with No Sew seam technology. 
“I work upstairs from Nike’s Innovation Kitchen, the company’s shoe think tank, and when I saw the sneakers there I thought we had to get better in apparel, so we started working on the lightest Windrunner ever made,” Jarrett Reynolds told me. “We stripped it down to 116 grams, as we know that adding or taking weight might mean winning or losing a competition, and came up with the Flywire. The minimalist design of the Laser Runner was definitely one of the hardest things to achieve as we had to continuously strip back the original design and introduce multi-functional details.”
Reynolds, who defines himself as “pretty nerdy” when it comes to the technicalities of Nike apparel, has got a fashion background which is actually echoed in some of the projects the young designer launched, such as the S.P.L.I.T., a jacket with a zipper that runs down its front and back and that allows to literally split the item, exchanging the panels of different jackets. “This project was inspired to me by the 1989 San Francisco Giants Vs Oakland Athletics baseball game,” Reynolds said. “Kids in and around the Bay area were happy that either of the teams they supported had made it to the World Series and I remember seeing a kid wearing a split hat – half Oakland Athletics, half Giants – and that image burnt inside my memory.” Though a rather cheesy concept, the jacket is dear to Reynolds also for its cultural implications. “That whole idea of ‘I am just one thing’ doesn’t apply anymore in the world we are living in,” he explained me. “Besides, the jacket is not just about showing your support to different teams, but it can also be used by athletes who want to pay homage to both their country and the host country at the Olympic Games.”
The young designer also worked on the medal stand jacket for the US team, what he defines “a nerve wrecking job”, as this is the piece of apparel that marks the climax of an athlete’s career and that gets seen all over the world. Based on the Windrunner, with its signature 26-degree chevron, classic front zip and hood, the jacket will only be available to US Olympians (and this will make breakdancers cry as the Medal Stand Windrunner is exactly the sort of jacket breakdancers would wear).
Creating sportswear for giants such as Nike can be an extremely depersonalising job, but Leyva and Reynolds seem to have successfully avoided this trap by constantly looking up at the company’s grassroot history. 
“We consistently go back to the nurturing and supportive relationship between running coach and designer Bill Bowerman and long distance runner Steve Prefontaine,” Leyva explained me. “Our relentless flow of ideas is constantly generated from their experiences: Bowerman used to go back on some of the products he made, crafting and re-crafting them. Today we do the same, but with great added value as we make the iconic products we love better, infuse them with innovation and take them forward into the future.”
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