When you attending at basketball shoes, what do you see? A big swoosh. Three stripes. Michael Jordan. A advance molded to your feet. But do you see the technology? Though maybe not as arrant as an Intel sticker on your laptop, every shoe showcases its own avant-garde technology. Don't worry, you can't absence it on these, the best basketball shoes on the planet. Because they cycle with carbon cilia and Kevlar.
The Mission
Nike's new Elite Series—the Lebron 9, Kobe VII and Hyperdunk—are the high-performance, no accommodation models of shoes already on the market. Think of them as a BMW M3 to a 3 Alternation or an AMG Mercedes to a approved Benz. Or even the new iPad to the iPad 2, if the new iPad were congenital with carbon cilia and Kevlar.
When I sat down with Nike to allocution about the action of designing the Elite series, what Nike Basketball Design Director Leo Chang and Senior Designer Jason Petrie fatigued to me was that "the shackles were off." That they weren't pressured to hit a assertive amount point to move units, but rather to accomplish the best basketball shoe they could. They were told to accomplish a bigger best. And they had to do it in time for this year's playoffs.
The ShoesIn person, the Elite Alternation bliss are absorbing but aswell understated. Black or white and brindled with gold, the shoes break accurate aboriginal absorbed of the approved model—with a few notable improvements. It's not that harder to accomplish a acceptable shoe better. Slap on a nice colorway and I'm already interested. Accomplish it flash with a bit of gold and I'm hooked. But it's the technology abaft these shoes that accomplish them interesting. The changes aren't just aesthetic. Chang and his aggregation bare the aboriginal shoe down, re-imagined it entirely, and again started from scratch.
The aboriginal step: bigger materials. While carbon cilia has become something of a cliche, it's still an different actual with the two a lot of important backdrop for able-bodied shoes: it's light, and it's strong. Replacing artificial or bottle cilia shanks (the allotment of the shoe beneath the accomplished of your foot) with carbon cilia and throwing carbon cilia on the heel adverse (the allotment that wraps your heel) makes the shoe abundant lighter and sturdier. Outfitting a shoe with that abundant carbon cilia is a cogent structural improvement.
As for the Kevlar, Nike acclimated congenital that into its absolute Flywire technology. That's the actual attenuate high of a shoe that looks like a bound mesh, and supports the bottom in key spots. Flywire is about fabricated with nylon and Vectran fibers, which is athletic abundant for accustomed use but not about as able as Kevlar. As Chang and Petrie acicular out, nylon has 30 percent amplitude to it while Kevlar has alone 1 percent. You can apprehension the aberration immediately; Kevlar-infused Flywire isn't as chiffon as the original, but it's still affluence flexible. Nike brand to say that it's stronger than steel. If Flywire is a abeyance bridge, application Kevlar with Flywire is like a avant-garde Calatrava, while its nylon analogue is a age-old board river access attentive by trolls.
The finishing touches? Nike's Pro Combat—those bendable pads football players wear—material on the tongue, a appropriate beat liner for bigger centralized traction, and Kevlar shoelaces. Yes. Kevlar shoelaces.
The Bottom LineAll that carbon cilia and Kevlar adds up to a lot of money. The Kobe and Hyperdunk amount $200 a pair, while the LeBron will set you aback $250. But Nike's ultimate ambition with the Elite alternation isn't to advertise a agglomeration of shoes. It's to actualize a shoe that's added affiliated to a abstraction car. Except it's a abstraction car you can drive. Er, wear. [Nike Elite Series]
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