‘I queued for three hours in the rain for Nike Air Max trainers – here’s why’

Today is a national holiday that your employer probably won’t give you a day off for.

March 26 is Air Max Day, dedicated to the Nike shoes worn by countless sneakerheads, basketball players, style gurus and probably your dad.

And that list includes Joe Parmley, a 24-year-old in Welwyn, Hertfordshire.

There are few trainers out there, he tells Metro, that he’d be willing to wait three hours in the rain to buy.

‘I queued at Birmingham City’s grounds for the limited run of the Undefeated x Nike 95 Birmingham trainers,’ the founder of Kicks N Coffee, a travelling festival, says.

‘Despite it being a cold Tuesday night in the middle of December, the energy at the drop was electric.

‘It really demonstrated how powerful sneaker culture can be when the trainer up for grabs is authentically rooted in place, identity and shared experience.’

But what exactly is the Nike Air Max, a shoe that apparently deserves its own dedicated day and rain-drenched fans?

What is the Nike Air Max and why do people celebrate Air Max Day?

What makes the line unique is an exposed bubble underneath the shoe that acts as a cushion.

Frank Rudy, Nasa’s ‘nutty professor’, came up with the idea.

While working as an aerospace engineer at the space agency, Ruby was introduced to ‘blow moulding’, which involves using pressured air to inflate plastic to make hollow objects like bottles.

Rudy sat down with Phil Knight, the co-founder and CEO of Nike, in 1977 to pitch filling a shoe with a gassy membrane.

‘Mr Knight, we’ve come up with a way to inject… air… into a running shoe,’ Knight recalled Rudy saying in the pitch meeting, complete with equations scribbled on a blackboard.

Writing in his memoir, Shoe Dog, Knight added: ‘I’d heard a lot of silliness from a lot of different people in the shoe business, but this. Oh. Brother.

‘Air shoes sounded to me like jet packs and moving sidewalks. Comic book stuff.’

One run wearing the airy kicks and a dinner later, Knight greenlit the idea.

Yet some Nike execs had their doubts, seeing it as a gimmick from an airhead – pun not intended.

‘The question was asked, how safe would you feel riding on see-through tyres?’ wrote former Nike ad guru JB Strasser and journalist Laurie Becklund in their book, Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There.

The first trainer to use the tech was the Nike Air Tailwind in 1978. 

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‘It was a work of postmodern art,’ Knight said of the model.

Nike ran into some trouble (again, no pun intended) because the Tailwind had a small defect.

Specks of metal in the silver dye grated the shoe mesh, forcing the company to issue a recall and sparking fears the Nike Air line was dead.

But if you have a pair of Air Max on or crammed in your gym bag, you know how this story ends.

Nike – and Rudy – kept pushing the new-fangled shoe, and 39 years ago saw the debut of the now Air Max 1.

It was complete with an ad that included the Beatles’ song Revolution, the first time one of the band’s songs had been used in a TV advert.

These kicks, designed by Tinker Hatfield, were the first time that an air unit was visible from the outside.

Hatfield was inspired by the Centre Pompidou, an inside-out art museum in Paris, Blair Cooper, creative director at Seen Studios, tells Metro.

‘The blue pipes on the outside of the building represent air conditioning, directly reflecting the concept of making functional systems visible,’ Blair says Hatfield told her when the pair met in New York in 2024.

At the time, Blair was working as a design director for brand experience at Nike, helping make the first neuroscience-backed footwear, Nike Mind 001.

‘What makes Air Max iconic is how naturally subcultures across the world adopted and reinterpreted it, from UK rave and grime to West Coast hip hop and terrace culture, evolving with them rather than tapping in from the outside,’ she adds.

‘Visible air became a relatable motif for street culture.’

That’s one of the line’s biggest appeals, says Daniel Fisher, the UK general manager of the live shopping platform, Whatnot: its timelessness.

‘It’s one of, if not the most iconic and timeless sneaker silhouette,’ he says.’It appeals to lifelong sneaker-heads and first-time buyers alike, which is pretty rare for any product, let alone one pushing 40.’

When is Nike Air Max Day?

Today! Nike now considers this bubble-filled trainer the ‘holy grail of sneaker lore’ and declared March 26, 2014, Air Max Day.

This was to mark the anniversary of the Air Max 1, now one of the most well-known shoes in sneakerdom.

Every year since, Nike has dropped new lines for cop-happy sneakerheads.

This year is no different. Big Swoosh is releasing:

• Nike Air Liquid Max
• Nike Air Max 95 Big Bubble
• Nike Air Max 90 ‘Infrared’
• Nike Air Max 95 Big Bubble ‘Greedy’
• Ducks of a Feather x Nike Air Max 95
• Patta x Nike Air Max 1
• Nike Air Max 95 ‘Bandana’
•  Zellerfeld x Nike Air Max 1000 ‘Black/Volt’

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