This article was published on April 25 and updated on May 23
The Year of the Jordan 2 continues with A Ma Maniére's take on the court classic, the Air Jordan 2 "Airness," revealed on April 25 mere days after we received an official look at Nina Chanel Abney's Jordan collab.
Wrapped in an exquisite leather upper and quilted lining ingeniously set atop a faux snakeskin midsole, A Ma Maniére's AJ2 epitomizes that sense of understated luxury that the retailer has defined through its other elevated remixes of early Jordan models, including the Jordan 1 and 3.
That's the A Ma Maniére difference: the boutique's sneaker collabs rarely tinker with each shoe's classic shape. Instead, A Ma Maniére opts to render the design in unparalleled quality, the archetypical IYKYK transformation.
Then, with the humbly lavish product on lock, A Ma Maniére intelligently develops the storytelling of each partnership through multimedia rollouts. For A Ma Maniére, there's no point in merely developing a new colorway or fabrication. Context is everything.
For instance, A Ma Maniére's Air Jordan 1, also called "Airness," was accompanied by a short film narrated by Nike exec Larry Miller and its Air Jordan 3 was printed with "Work Harder," printed in the handwritten scrawl of A Ma Maniére founder James Whitner's mother.
“Action takes 18 months as it connects to product, and if you look at the stories we've been telling, we've consistently been us every day,” A Ma Maniére founder James Whitner told Highsnobiety last year. “But the consumer and the marketplace generally acknowledge action through product... the difference is managing the narrative in between. Because we live in a world of sound bites and headlines.”
Poet Kyla Lacey provides the emotional weight for A Ma Maniére's Air Jordan 2.
In a brief clip, she delivers a verse rooted in the themes that align neatly with the A Ma Maniére business model: proficiency, Blackness, lineage, resilience.
After pushing back the sneaker's original May 13 release date – announced shortly after an attempted break-in at the brand's Atlanta boutique — A Ma Maniére has rescheduled its collaborative Air Jordan 2 drop for June 1 at 11AM EST on the A Ma Maniére site. A SNKRS release will likely follow.
