Designed by Peter Moore and released on 21 July 2021 as part of the Air Jordan 1 line. This release has a leather upper in Black/Very Berry/White. Very Berry is the Air Jordan 1 in a colour with no basketball justification at all, which after four decades is entirely the point. The shoe began as equipment: Peter Moore's design with Bruce Kilgore, produced for Michael Jordan in November 1984, on sale from April 1985, in the red, black and white of Chicago. Once the model outlived its performance life it became the brand's colour laboratory, and a deep pink berry tone is what that laboratory produces when it is not thinking about teams. On the Mid, the cut that carries most of the line's experimental makeups, with style code 554725 016, it is a shoe designed to be worn rather than kept in a box.
Berry is loud, so give it a quiet room. Black straight leg jeans with a black tee makes the shoe the single point of colour, which is the strongest version. Alternatively, grey sweatpants with a white tee and a grey hoodie turns it into a soft, tonal outfit where the pink lifts rather than shouts. Avoid red, orange or purple in the same look, since all three will clash with a berry tone. Cuff the hem so the Mid collar reads. Sizing runs long for many feet. Keep the pair out of long sunlight, since saturated dyes shift first, and clean with a damp cloth rather than a soaking wash.
The Air Jordan 1's ability to carry any colour is a direct result of how thoroughly it entered culture in the first place, through Spike Lee's Nike advertising, where he directed and played Mars Blackmon opposite Jordan, and through 2Pac, The Notorious B.I.G., Ice Cube and Jay-Z referencing the shoes on record. Since then the model has been reinterpreted by Off-White under Virgil Abloh, Dior, Comme des Garcons, Supreme and KAWS, and worked on by musicians including Drake, Billie Eilish, J Balvin, Eminem and Nicki Minaj. Bright non team colourways are the accessible end of that same freedom.
The panel map is the original: separate toe, quarter and collar sections divided by visible stitching, with the Swoosh across the side and the collar stopping below the ankle bone. Berry carries the leading panels with white handling the counter blocking, so the colour sits in defined fields and the seams stay readable at distance. A saturated pink on leather picks up light differently across the panels, which makes the shoe look richer in daylight than under artificial light, worth knowing if you are judging it in a store. Expect creasing across the toe box. The Mid's lower collar keeps break in short and lets the shoe sit under a hem without bunching.
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