Thirty Years Later, Nike Once Again Making Taxis
When veteran Nike designer Tinker Hatfield started to work on the Air Jordan 12, he drew from three sources of inspiration: Michael Jordan’s unstoppable ascent, Japan’s Rising Sun flag, and New York City's yellow cabs.
The resulting shoe, launched in 1996, featured sunray-like stitching on black-and-white leather and gold eyelets taxi-cab-like details that earned the first Air Jordan 12 the nickname “Taxi.”
Following the launch, Michael Jordan wore several versions of the sneaker throughout the 1996–97 NBA season, most famously a red-and-black pair during the NBA Finals, when he scored 38 points while battling a gnarly fever and food poisoning. That night, the shoe became a symbol of his unrelenting willpower, earning the title of "Flu Game" in the meantime.
Visually, the Air Jordan 12 stood out from the jump. It introduced instantly recognizable Zoom Air cushioning, an element of tech that would go on to define many of Nike’s future models.
Second, its diagonal, sunray-like stitching, inspired by the Kyokujitsu-ki Rising Sun flag, gave the shoe's upper its distinctive look. The motif was controversial, however, as critics pointed to the flag's association with Japan’s colonial past, which led to the shoe being temporarily banned in South Korea in 2016.
And yet, the Air Jordan 12 remains one of the rare later-era classic Jordans. Over the years, it spawned dozens of reworks, including a golden reinterpretation of the Taxi in 2021 and a re-release of the “Flu Game” red and black tones earlier this year.
Still, nothing quite hits like the OG: black and white leather, crisp diagonal lines, and those unmistakable gold cab-inspired eyelets. And, nearly three decades later, the sneaker returns in that original colorway November 8 on Nike’s SNKRS app for $125.
The Taxi re-issue stays true to Hatfield’s original 1996 vision and is even packaged in a manner that closely resembles that first drop nearly 30 years back, bringing an all-time Jordan silhouette around so that the past meets the present.
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