If a superhero needed a sneaker alter-ego, Nike's Space Hippies would fit the bill perfectly. The shoe of the moment or perhaps even the decade that was showcased at this month’s New York Fashion week demonstrated Nike’s epic take on sustainability and the brand’s complete devotion to leading the change and spreading awareness across the industry.
The sneakers,which were crafted completely out of scrap material from Nikes factories is nothing short of a design wonder. The striking shoe not strikes an astounding aesthetic balance on the outside but also boasts an innate inner beauty as it has only utilised residual materials to emit a zero carbon footprint.
Nike is using its impressive platform to address the urgency for change in the fashion industry with regards to incorporating sustainable measures to protect the planet from further damage. Space Hippie is the perfectly sustainable product to showcase Nike's new design movement which focuses on a zero carbon philosophy. Redefining luxury whilst simultaneously reducing carbon its footprint, the Space Hippies are cushioned using foam scraps from factory floors, are created using recycled yarn and feature purposely left the soles undyed to reduce their consumption.
“Space Hippy is the pinnacle expression of the palette of our sustainable materials – but they’re scalable across the whole company,” explained Noah Murphy-Reinhertz, Nike’s Sustainability Design Lead. “It’s a wild manifestation, but one that creates tools that everyone can use.”
These shoes are changing the game - it's breaking barriers of material sourcing, it's thinkng of the future by changing the present. Driving us all onto a new vision and making us start to question how things are made and used and reuse.
Images courtesy of Nike & Jinane Ennasri
