make up a large portion of my wardrobe. The styles that I wear on regular rotation – which, at the moment, are my Sambas and Japans (in multiple colours) – sit at the front of my wardrobe, ready to be whipped out at a moment’s notice. But a recent spring clean led me to stumble upon two pairs of Nike Cortez trainers that had been gathering dust on my shoe rack.
One pair is rendered in the original white, blue and red colourway – as famously featured in and worn by Whitney Houston during her Super Bowl 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 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 laces (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 Nike co-founder and coach, Bill Bowerman, with an official debut at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Positioned as a shoe for long-distance runners, its unique design incorporates cushioning with a layer of sponge rubber between the grippy, herringbone outsole and the leather upper – to absorb surface i.
