How Nike Won the Cultural Marathon

Mr. Cooke met Mark Parker, then Nike’s chief executive, in 2003, when Mr. Parker and a few other colleagues were on a covert tour of London’s underground (the substrata of cool, not the subway system). Shortly thereafter, they offered him a job as what amounts to an ambassador of edge, romancing what’s bubbling up and dousing it in the world of swoosh.

“My job was to work with outsiders,” said Mr. Cooke, who now has the very elaborate (and constantly changing) title of senior director, global special projects and catalyst brand management.

Since then, he has been responsible for bringing in a host of edgy, not-part-of-sports names with their own followings: Comme des Garçons, Riccardo Tisci (starting when he was at Givenchy), Kim Jones of Dior, Mr. Abloh (long before he was a twinkle in Louis Vuitton’s eye), Chitose Abe of Sacai. (There’s an arms race of sorts going on between sneaker brands for fashion partners, as lines between different segments of “apparel” get mushier and mushier.) Catalyst brand management also spearheads relationships with other nontraditional Nike partners like Travis Scott, Drake and Billie Eilish.

The point is to design “not items but ideas,” Mr. Hoke said. When the artist Tom Sachs signed on more than a decade ago, he said he wanted to build a solid bronze skateboard ramp. (That didn’t go over too well, but it led to the Mars Yard shoe and a foray into melding Nikes and the moon shot.) Which is why this particular group of outsiders are called catalysts rather than collaborators, collaborators have become a dime a dozen — and pretty starkly transactional rather than theoretical.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/style/nike-culture.html