Nike Air Max 95

Sergio Lozano was a Nike designer who had worked on tennis, training and the outdoorsy ACG line when he inherited the running project that became the Air Max 95. He has told the origin story often: on a rainy Oregon day he pictured rain eroding the earth and sketched a shoe with striations "very similar to what you see on the walls of the Grand Canyon." Human anatomy supplied the rest. The nylon eyelets became ribs, the shank along the outsole and heel a spine, and the layered mesh and suede of the upper stood in for muscle fibers and flesh.

Several details were firsts for Nike running. The neon yellow was not new, a nod to Nike's racing heritage, but it landed on the lace loops and on the visible Air units, the first ever placed under the forefoot. Dark gray and black sat near the base to hide dirt, and the black midsole was the first Nike had ever put on a running shoe. The original design had no Swoosh at all; a small one was added at the heel as what Lozano called a punctuation mark. Inside Nike, he recalled, "there were lovers and haters," and when the shoe launched in 1995 the company matched the box to the neon.

The street took it from there. Hip-hop name-checked it, Liverpool christened it the "110s" after its £110 UK price, and in Japan it became so coveted that "Air Max hunting," muggings for the shoes on people's feet, entered the vocabulary. Two years later Christian Tresser's Air Max 97, inspired by Japanese bullet trains, stretched the visible Air nearly the full length of the sole and became Italy's favorite instead. Three decades on, the 95 is still in production, and the neon original is the colorway everyone means.