A recent spring clean led me to stumble upon two pairs of Nike Cortez trainers that had been gathering dust on my shoe rack. Nike make up a large portion of my wardrobe. The styles that I wear on regular rotation—which, at the moment, are my and Japans (in multiple colours)—sit at the front of my wardrobe, ready to be whipped out at a moment’s notice.
But turns out Nike Cortez are having a bit of a resurgence. One pair is rendered in the original white, blue and red colourway—as famously featured in and worn by Whitney Houston during her halftime performance in 1991—and the other are a box-fresh white pair with black accents that I bought on Depop a few years back. I kicked myself for having disregarded them for so long, as I rarely buy or keep anything that I don’t wear—and these definitely deserve to be worn.
The white, blue and red pair have been with me for over eight years, and I even used them as a vessel to hand in a university project with a memory-stick attached to the (it’s a long story). The Nike Cortez—searches for which, Lyst reports, have been up 51 per cent over the past six months—are one of the sports behemoth’s best-selling models, and were first conceived in the ’60s by co-founder and coach, Bill Bowerman, with an official debut at the Munich in 1972. Positioned as a shoe for long-distance runners, its unique design incorporates cushioning with a layer of sponge between the grippy, herringbone outsole and the leather upper – to abs.
