“It’s not just about making things new, but new and better”: Inside Nike’s plan to take its most iconic innovation beyond shoes

For most people, Nike Air means cushioning, visible bubbles in midsoles, the Air Max lineage and decades of incremental improvements to what sits underfoot. But at Nike’s Unlimited Air exhibition in Milan, the brand made a different argument.

Unlimited Air exhibition is an immersive exploration of Nike’s relationship with its most iconic technology, tracing 50 years of development from the first encapsulated Air units to the latest performance and apparel innovations.

Across a series of galleries styled as laboratories and ateliers, the show weaves together science, design, art and athletic insight to demonstrate how air continues to influence everything from cooling fabrics to adaptive outerwear.

The company’s messaging was made abundantly clear during our tour of the exhibition. After 50 years of visible Air units, the next phase of innovation may have less to do with running shoes and more to do with regulating the body itself.

As the company’s Chief Design Officer, Martin Lotti put it during the opening tour, “It’s not just about making things new, but new and better.”

50 years of Air, and counting

Lotti began by revisiting familiar ground. Air first appeared in 1978 in the Tailwind, developed from aerospace engineer Frank Rudy’s concept of encapsulated gas cushioning. In 1987, Tinker Hatfield’s Air Max 1 made the technology visible, turning performance engineering into cultural iconography.

Lotti bought his first Air Max 180 while being in Portland, Oregon, as an exchange student, not knowing that later on, he would design the successor of the shoes. “I counted my money to see what I could afford, and walked out of the store with the Air Max 180, not knowing that a few years later, I would design the next iteration, the Air Max 360.”

With all its footwear iterations, Nike has repeatedly reworked the same idea of pressurised air, tuned for impact absorption and energy return. Yet the tone in Milan was less retrospective celebration and more forward-looking repositioning. “After 50 years, there is so much more we can do with Air,” Lotti said. “We’re just at the beginning.”

Turns out, Air is a versatile technology that can be used for cooling as well as warming in footwear, apparel and beyond. It is a conceptual shift from Nike, one that tries to reframe Air as a broader design platform. And through Radical AirFlow and the Air Milano Jacket, the company puts forward a solid argument for its case.

Cooling without electronics

Moving on to the next space, Dan Farron, VP of Apparel Innovation, presented the Radical AirFlow concept, introduced last year. The premise is simple but technically ambitious: create a fabric that cools the body more efficiently without adding fans, batteries or active systems.

Radical AirFlow relies on micro-funnel structures built into the mesh. Inspired by the Bernoulli principle, the openings are engineered to accelerate air as it passes through the garment. Inside, turbulence increases air movement across the skin, enhancing evaporative cooling.

According to Farron, they went through hundreds of material iterations, with the original concept being a long-sleeve top full of metal ball bearings, which was incredibly heavy and freezing cold. “So from there, we asked, well, what can we do with this if it's so cold?” he added, “How can we recreate that through traditional methods?”

The fabric was tested in Nike’s environmental chambers in Oregon, where temperature, humidity and wind can be simulated. The company also installed a low-key version of the chamber in Milan, complete with an athlete wearing the Radical AirFlow top and a heat camera, to prove to us the benefits of the technology in real time.

“There’s no power behind it,” Farron explained during the show. “It’s continuously cooling.” The initial prototypes were tested on one of the harshest proving grounds in distance running, the Western States 100-mile race in California, where temperatures can exceed 100°F (~38 °C).

Caleb Olson won the 2025 Radical AirFlow race, and since then, it has become a core piece of kit for many athletes, including road running legend Eliud Kipchoge, who wore it at the New York Marathon.

The exhibition featured samples of the Radical AirFlow short, and I tried it on to see if it works. The sensation is hard to explain, but it can be felt instantly as soon as you start moving your body. The hundreds of funnels channel air to provide rapid cooling, which I can see would work well in extreme conditions.

For the best results, you want to wear it on your bare skin, which, for understandable reasons, I didn’t want to put people through during the tour. However, in exposed skin, such as my arms, the cooling effect was pronounced. In short, the tech works, and better still, it’s made from 100% recycled materials.

Designing for multiple states

If Radical AirFlow represents passive cooling, the Air Milano Jacket pushes Air into more visibly transformative territory. Presented by Danielle Kayemebe from Nike’s Apparel Product Innovation team, the jacket was originally planned for release in 2028. Instead, it was accelerated by 3 years to align with the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics.

At first glance, it resembles a technical shell, but at the push of a button, it inflates in under 20 seconds, shifting from a lightweight outer layer to an insulated midweight piece. And as we were told, the engineering challenge lies deeper than the inflation mechanism itself.

Nike’s team spent months studying “baffle height” and temperature response, building multiple prototypes to determine how much air was required to achieve specific thermal effects. The breakthrough came in what Kayemebe described as the “physics of inflation”.

Each air chamber is structured around precisely spaced dot patterns. If the dots sit too close together, the garment risks structural weakness. Too far apart, and inflation becomes unstable. Nike used computational algorithms to calculate optimal spacing and pattern integrity.

Crucially, the design had to work in more than one state. The team refers to this as “multi-state apparel,” a garment that looks and functions properly both inflated and deflated. Traditional down jackets rely on horizontal channels to hold fill in place. With air as the insulator, those constraints disappear, opening up new aesthetic possibilities, including patterns subtly inspired by Nike ACG’s triangular logo geometry.

The Air Milano Jacket isn’t available to buy for the public yet, at least until Nike figures out how to scale up production. Even when it does, expect the jacket to be priced in line with the amount of innovation that went into creating it.

Air as environmental control

Radical AirFlow and the Air Milano Jacket suggest that Nike’s next chapter for Air is more about environmental regulation than impact protection. Cooling in extreme heat, adjustable insulation in cold conditions, and garments that adapt as the body warms up or slows down.

None of this replaces the Air unit in footwear. Rather, it extends the philosophy behind it, using pressurised air as a functional tool to improve athletic performance. The Unlimited Air exhibition may be framed as a 50-year retrospective, but the underlying message is forward-looking.

Air is no longer just something underfoot. It is becoming something that sits between the athlete and the environment. As Lotti put it, the goal is not simply to introduce something different. It is to make it better.