Nike · Air Force 1 · 40th Anniversary
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Forces
Creative Director + Producer · Ona Creative · 2022
Nike handed us the concept for the AF1’s 40th — and hip-hop’s 50th — but not the execution. That was ours: a national campaign telling the story of each shoe in a way that was iconic and authentic to the city it came from. I directed and produced it on the road, shaping each city’s concept, sourcing era-accurate props, and casting local photographers and crews at every stop. It won an internal Nike Award, and it gave me my first large-scale billboards — Times Square in New York and the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
You can't celebrate 40 years of the AF1 without acknowledging its deep connection to hip-hop — so it was only right to take it back to the Bronx, where it all began. We recreated the legendary 1973 Back to School Jam, and the 'Bronx Origin' shoe pays homage to hip-hop's Bronx roots. Casting pulled from the Bronx, past and present: Grand Wizard Theodore, Crazy Legs, Paradise Gray, Ice Spice, and Hype Girl with her dance crew.
The birth of hip-hop in ’73 set off a revolution across music, art, dance and fashion. We put multiple generations of it in the same room at a recreation of the Back to School Jam that started it — the OGs who built it and the artists carrying it now, in the same frame.
Every city got its own concept, its own props and its own crew. New Orleans was Curren$y’s.
A 3-piece CIRCA billboard wrapping the Staples Center in Los Angeles, plus Times Square in New York — my first large-scale outdoor.
The motion work that ran alongside the stills — the cuts that actually went out.