{"id":23200,"date":"2022-07-22T15:47:28","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T07:47:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/?p=23200"},"modified":"2022-08-22T18:00:44","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T10:00:44","slug":"nike-air-kukini-mighty-swooshers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/2022\/07\/22\/nike-air-kukini-mighty-swooshers\/","title":{"rendered":"Nike Gives Its Failed Superhero a Redemption Arc With the Air Kukini \u201cMighty Swooshers\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Swoosh Man\u2014or the mononym Swoosh, as per his official name\u2014was a superhero mascot introduced in the 1990s by Nike&#8217;s nascent Sports Entertainment division. Unfortunately for the man, his contemporaries in the superhero realm at the time were the incredibly neon and nipple-embossed Batmen of Joel Schumacher&#8217;s creation; who didn&#8217;t really give their crimefighting brand a good name. If he&#8217;d arrived in a post-Iron Man world, he might&#8217;ve been the leader of a brand division that would be making Phil Knight the richest non-athlete in sports, undisputedly.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-23233\" src=\"https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/22145036\/Nike-Swoosh-Man-Superhero.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1150\" height=\"732\" srcset=\"https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/22145036\/Nike-Swoosh-Man-Superhero.jpeg 1150w, https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/22145036\/Nike-Swoosh-Man-Superhero-300x191.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/22145036\/Nike-Swoosh-Man-Superhero-1024x652.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/22145036\/Nike-Swoosh-Man-Superhero-768x489.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/22145036\/Nike-Swoosh-Man-Superhero-282x179.jpeg 282w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1150px) 100vw, 1150px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>For now, our humble superhero would have to settle as the face of the new Nike Air Kukini design.<\/p>\n<p>The sneaker was first introduced in the post-Matrix Y2K, in a time when futurism was indelibly permeating the zeitgeist. Hence, the aesthetic. 20 years on and the shoe is seeing a resurgence with wild new iterations coming one after another like the <a title=\"Nike Air Kukini \u201cGlitch\u201d\" href=\"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/2022\/06\/02\/release-2022-first-look-at-the-nike-air-kukini-glitch\/\">&#8220;Glitch&#8221;<\/a> and the <a title=\"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/2022\/04\/11\/nike-air-kukini-se-lemon-venom-and-aurora\/\" href=\"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/2022\/04\/11\/nike-air-kukini-se-lemon-venom-and-aurora\/\">\u201cLemon Venom and Aurora\u201d<\/a> colorways.<\/p>\n<p>This one&#8217;s decked in a dominant silver chrome that even Alex Murphy (aka RoboCop) could wear on his off day. While its signatures remain\u2014the TPU web cage overlay and the Air Bubble unit on the heel of the outsole\u2014there&#8217;re some distinctions. The Swoosh Man is patterned across the upper over a comic strip base, stylized after the elements of the superhero genre. The insoles feature names of a fictional program that inspired the design: &#8220;Nike and the Mighty Swooshers&#8221; on the left pair and &#8220;The Battle of Dimension Six&#8221; on the right (Dimension Six being what Nike would&#8217;ve been called if Phil Knight had his way).<\/p>\n<p>As much as we would want to see new retrofitting of classic models, this one doesn&#8217;t require any. It was already designed for the future from its inception. It&#8217;s simple enough a canvas for new experimentation, yet inimitable enough to become iconic.<\/p>\n<p>Check out another Nike Air Kukini we love, the <a title=\"Nike Air Kukini \u201cLeopard Kumquat and Action Red\u201d\" href=\"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/2022\/04\/29\/nike-air-kukini-leopard-kumquat-and-action-red\/\">\u201cLeopard Kumquat and Action Red.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/snkrdunk_int\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-22285 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/20154621\/Magazine-Bottom-Banner-copy.webp\" alt=\"Magazine-Bottom-Banner\" width=\"970\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/20154621\/Magazine-Bottom-Banner-copy.webp 970w, https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/20154621\/Magazine-Bottom-Banner-copy-300x93.webp 300w, https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/20154621\/Magazine-Bottom-Banner-copy-768x238.webp 768w, https:\/\/snkrdunk.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/20154621\/Magazine-Bottom-Banner-copy-282x87.webp 282w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 970px) 100vw, 970px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Based on the Swoosh Man, Nike&#8217;s mid-90s superhero mascot who probably ran so fast he became too ahead of his time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":23213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,21,18,3,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brands","category-calendar","category-latest-news","category-nike","category-releases"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23200"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23200"}],"version-history":[{"count":66,"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32686,"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23200\/revisions\/32686"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snkrdunk.com\/en\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}