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Few people have derived more profit from a colleague’s superstition than Tim Hallam, a former communications director for the Chicago Bulls. In the spring of 1991, the Bulls were preparing for their first NBA Finals, against Magic Johnson’s aging Lakers, when Hallam approached Michael Jordan, the team’s superstar, to ask him for a kindness. If, as expected, the Bulls won, would Jordan give him a shoe from the clinching game? Jordan agreed, the Bulls won, and, in the confetti frenzy of tears and champagne that followed, he made good. Then, after the Bulls won their second championship 12 months later, Jordan did it again. Perhaps unwilling to displease or otherwise disturb the hidden cosmic operations that had delivered him to the apex of the basketball world, he made the gift into a ritual: After the final buzzer sounded on each of the six titles he won with the Bulls, he’d pull off one of his shoes, sign it, and hand it over to Hallam.
On February 2, Sotheby’s is planning to auction off these shoes as a lot. The company is calling it the “dynasty collection” and billing it as the most significant set of Air Jordan sneakers ever brought to market. “It’s an unparalleled collection,” Dylan Dittrich, an analyst at Altan Insights who covers collectible shoes, told me. “It’s hard to even believe that it exists. These are shoes worn by the most important athlete of the century during the most pivotal games of his career.” For basketball fans, these are relics of the True Cross.
And yet: This is the second time in only a year that the dynasty collection has been available for purchase. Last March, Sotheby’s sent the same shoes out on tour to chum the waters for a private sale. They stopped in cities known for billionaire foot traffic: Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai. A prominent collector told The Wall Street Journal that they would go for at least $20 million. He indicated that he would not be surprised if they fetched $100 million. Those predictions do not appear to have panned out, because Sotheby’s now has the shoes back on the block for just $7–10 million. Maybe the timing for these sales has been off. The sports-memorabilia market has certainly come off its pandemic highs. Or maybe, after a nearly 10-year boom, the mystique of the Jordan brand has begun to dim.
Jordan is arguably the most successful male model in history. His brand first became a force in the 1980s, during his early playing career, when he embodied cool in his physique and in nearly everything that he wore. The first shoe to bear his name, the Jordan 1, was released in 1985, when “signature shoes for basketball players weren't really a thing,” says Russ Bengtson, the author of A History of Basketball in 15 Sneakers. It brought in $126 million in revenue. Sneakerheads will talk about a shoe’s “silhouette,” its three-dimensional shape stripped of color and texture. The Jordan 1 had the sweetest silhouette in sneaker history when it debuted, and may never have relinquished that title. That’s why people still feel comfortable wearing Jordan 1s, not only with basketball shorts, but with jeans, skirts, dresses, or suits. No other basketball player has so successfully transformed a shoe built for the court into a staple of everyday casual gear. Following his untimely death, Kobe Bryant’s shoes have become particularly popular, Bengtson told me. But people don’t wear Kobes—or LeBrons—for trips to the grocery store and the presidential inauguration alike.
Jordan released 17 more shoes before he retired from the NBA in 2003, and they continued to be popular while he was playing. After he stopped playing, the brand’s signature shoes became less popular, Dittrich says. Fans weren’t yet nostalgic for Jordan at his greatest with the Bulls. They were still seeing the afterimages of his more human closing years with the Washington Wizards, when he was merely good for his age. Jordan struggled to remain a symbol of pure victory in retirement. He kept releasing shoes, but they tended to be ugly. The Jordan 19s—which came out the year after he stopped playing—were even veiled, as though embarrassed. Under normal circumstances, Jordan’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, in 2009, might have brought him a surge of goodwill, and perhaps renewed interest in his brand. But it didn’t, in part because he gave a bizarrely ungracious acceptance speech, full of score-settling and bitter grievance. Perhaps worst of all, for shoe sales, he was no longer regarded as being particularly stylish. To the contrary, he was mocked for clinging too long to loud sports coats, baggy jeans, and other ’90s trends.
Fortunately for Jordan, a surge of interest in retro basketball sneakers was about to begin. Black Americans were alive to the athletic shoe as an aesthetic object long before the white cultural mainstream tuned in. Hobbyists, primarily from the hip-hop community, had for decades been collecting the most beautiful and resonant basketball sneakers. But the market for these shoes was small and fragmented. In the mid-2010s, two dedicated online marketplaces—StockX and GOAT—launched, and enthusiasts suddenly had an easier way to sell their Foamposite Penny Hardaways, or their old Air Maxes, or, most coveted of all, their retro Jordans.
The pandemic spiked demand for these shoes even higher. People were stuck at home, with nothing to do but await packages. The money printer was going brrr. The Last Dance, ESPN’s documentary about Jordan, was a staple of early COVID monoculture, and it played like an eight-hour commercial for his greatness. On the first three Sundays when episodes aired, traffic to Jordan shoes on StockX increased by more than 60 percent. Nike saw an opportunity, Bengtson said, and fire-hosed retro releases into the world. After social-distancing restrictions were lifted, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing people wearing them. Most popular of all were the original Jordan 1s.
The demand for retro Jordan 1s remained rabid for more than a year after The Last Dance aired. Nike could release them in almost any color combination imaginable, including truly terrible ones, and count on them to sell out. Unless you were rapidly refreshing your Nike app on release date, you’d have to buy them for a higher price on StockX or GOAT. In 2020, new Jordan 1 colorways fetched a 61 percent premium over their retail price, Dittrich, the shoe-market analyst, told me. The 2021 releases sold at a 50 percent premium. The shoe’s cultural currency was so potent that Amazon green-lighted a feature film, Air, about its origin story. Matt Damon starred as Sonny Vaccaro, a schlubby white executive who helped sign Jordan to Nike. Ben Affleck, who directed, played Phil Knight, the company’s CEO. Jordan himself is a minor character. His face is never shown, and he has only a single line. This movie is about shoes.
But by the time Air made it to the big screen last May, the fervor for retro Jordans was already starting to fade. Bengtson blames Nike for flooding the market. “There are just so many releases every single week,” he said. Tastemakers have noted the glut. The fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane recently placed retro Jordans at their “Lowest Point of Coolness ever,” especially in “non-O.G. colors, but also, sorry, just all of them … [Jordans] have never looked as costumey & washed on foot.” The resale market has also shown strong symptoms of Jordan fatigue. In 2022, the release premium on new Jordan 1 colorways dipped to 23 percent, Dittrich told me. (Anecdotally, my son, who does some light reselling, reported this same downswing.) Through the first half of 2023, Jordan 1s actually resold at a 2 percent discount.
No trend can last forever. Fashion is cyclical. The question is whether we can expect Jordan fever to return, and whether it will be as intense the next time it strikes. Bengtson is bearish. “We’re moving further away from Jordan’s playing career,” he told me. “It’s gone from consumers having direct memory of watching him play, to stories from older brothers and friends, to stories from parents.” Jordan’s highlight packages still do numbers on TikTok, but there is something qualitatively different about consuming an algorithmic drip feed of 30-year-old clips while you’re on your iPhone in bed. That’s not an experience that imprints visceral memories. Gen Xers and even some Millennials can remember where they were when Jordan elevated, according to some higher physics, and stuck a game winner on the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Craig Ehlo. They can still hear the involuntary way that announcer Marv Albert’s voice rose—“ a spectacular move”—as Jordan soared through a forest of Lakers, moving the ball fluidly from his right hand to his left.
“There’s a growing dichotomy in how different generations understand the Jordan brand,” Dittrich told me. “Somebody who is 18 years old doesn’t know the brand because MJ laced up the Concord 11s when he came back to the NBA. They know the brand because Jordan shoes have recently sold out or have otherwise been very hard to buy.” In other words, young people know Jordan’s shoes. They know the formally elegant Jumpman logo. But they may not know much about the man himself. If the brand is going to capture a new generation, it will need to put out fresh products, Dittrich said: “They can’t keep leaning on the same old Jordans from the ’90s.”
It’s not clear whether this latest swoon has been (or will remain) a drag on the dynasty collection’s value. A mass-market fashion brand has to cater to fickle youth, but Sotheby’s doesn’t. Today’s top memorabilia buyers come from the older generations, who watched Jordan in his prime. Having just made partner or sold a business, they may be newly inclined to see something of themselves in Jordan’s story. In September 2022, a jersey that Jordan wore in the first game of his last NBA Finals went up for auction. It was estimated to sell for “only” $5 million, but the bidding war was more intense than anticipated, and it ultimately went for a higher price—$10.1 million—than even the jersey that Diego Maradona wore while scoring his “Hand of God” goal in the 1986 World Cup. The Jordan jersey, which did not come from a particularly remarkable game, is now the most expensive game-worn garment ever sold.
Recent sales of Jordan’s shoes haven’t come close to that jersey’s selling price, despite how central they are to his mythology. Last April, a pair that he wore in his last NBA Finals sold for $2.2 million, a record for sneakers but the bottom end of its estimated range. The ones that he wore during his famous “flu game” also recently came up for auction. Any basketball fan above a certain age can easily summon to mind the image of a sickened and exhausted Jordan slumping over onto Scottie Pippen on his way to the bench, having just gutted out 38 points. But the shoes that were on his feet at that moment sold for only $1.4 million. Perhaps footwear just doesn’t pop like a jersey on the illuminated wall of a plutocrat’s man cave. Or perhaps the very popularity of the Air Jordan brand, its continual reinvention and readoption by the young, has widened the psychic distance between the shoes and the original experience of Michael Jordan. Older collectors bid up his jersey because it reminds them of how he played the game. The shoes may now seem like trendy objects, artifacts that belong more squarely to the history of fashion than to basketball.