Nike’s OG Luxe Running Shoe Gets the Wales Bonner Treatment
Did Wales Bonner just drop a Nike Cortez shoe? Well, not quite. At least not yet. However, Nike's leather Cortez SE sneaker does look like a student of the Wales Bonner school of stylish sneakers.
Say what you want, but I'm choosing to take this as some sort of foreshadowing. Unlikely but sometimes delulu is the solulu. Right?
Back to the subject at hand, though. Nike's Cortez SE sneaker has that classic Cortez build, complete with the foot-hugging upper, originally designed with distance runners in mind.
But the Cortez SE swaps out the standard tongue mechanism, opting instead for a flipped-out tongue or a "popped" tongue, as the kids say.
The upper is also made with a glossy synthetic leather upper that Nike also used on its silver and slick Killshot 2 Premium sneaker. Funny enough, that sneaker also sports a flipped tongue. Guess it runs in the family.
The Cortez SE shoe’s tongue looks a lot like the flipped-out tongue style made popular by Wales Bonner's adidas Samba sneaker that quite literally tilted the sneaker world on its axis.
Nike's Cortez sneaker was already a wildly stylish sneaker as is and it has more than earned its stripes in the world of fashion.
But there is just something about the Nike Cortez SE that really takes the shoe's aesthetic aura to new heights.
And as it stands, the Nike Cortez SE, soon available on the Nike website for about $100, is the closest thing we have to an official Nike Wales Bonner collab and it’s likely all we'll be getting in the near future as well.
But hey, crazier things have happened. Maybe it's time to tap in with the Etsy witches.
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