His Royal Airness gets censored as part of Nike’s 40th Anniversary of Icon Air Jordan 1

Sneakerheads and sports fans have been sent into orbit, enjoying some good old-fashioned guerrilla marketing to celebrate 40 years of a good old-fashioned icon: the Nike Jordan Air 1’s.

And Don Ferguson, deputy managing director, Hope&Glory is here for it.

Last week, as fans stepped onto the hallowed turf of the United Centre, the home of their beloved Chicago Bulls, they were greeted by black bars covering the kicks on the feet of the Michael Jordan statue.

With its iconic Air Jordan trainers obscured, Nike’s playful stunt pays homage to a watershed moment in their shared history born out of controversial beginnings in which the NBA attempted to prohibit him from wearing the iconic "Bred" (black and red) colourway which violated archaic league uniform policy at the time.

And for anyone who has watched lockdown hit ‘The Last Dance’ or Nike biopic ‘Air’ knows, Jordan shunned the rules to incur a $5,000 per game fine that Nike paid and capitalised on in a publicity campaign, releasing a 1985 “Banned” ad, which placed animated black bars over the Air Jordan 1s amid the NBA’s shoe restrictions at the time. They sold literally millions of shoes, and the rest is, as they say, history.

What’s more, the self-referential marketing campaign hasn’t stopped there, with tickers scrolling around the statues with the words: "If it was just a shoe, why did they try to ban it?”

With the gag preceding the statue stunt, the brand deactivated its Instagram and placed black bars over the online retail of the shoe.

With this one-two-punch of IRL and URL frenzy making tomfoolery sending social media ablaze, the internal comms machine even got in on the action and a handful of Nike employees got handed a playful "citation" by some besuited and official-looking fashion police roaming around Nike HQ for turning up in Jordans.

This all precedes, yep, you guessed it, a drop of a limited run of reimagined Air Jordan 1 '85 "Bred" shoes, hitting retailers on the 14th Feb and said to be a properly faithful recreation of the original. And with 10,000 pairs up for grabs, this is a guaranteed way to create the desired meltdown amongst sneakerheads.

All remarkably simple, befittingly old school and classic in its approach to creating hysteria around its own iconic lore, this is a beautifully choreographed bit of hysteria-making and a gentle reminder of Nike’s OG status when it comes to kicks.