Air Jordan 1 RETRO High OG Royal Toe

Recipe one: charcoal wool trousers with a navy roll neck and a black overcoat, the royal toe reading as the only saturated point in a cold palette. Recipe two: black straight leg denim, a white tee and a royal accented jacket or cap, a direct reading of the colour block. This is an autumn to spring shoe, and the high collar wants a full length or slightly stacked trouser rather than a crop. Fit runs true for most, half up if your forefoot is wide. Wear dark socks for the first outings while the blue dye settles, clean with mild soap and minimal water, keep out of prolonged sun, and store cool and dry, since ageing midsole materials degrade over time.

This is sold as footwear you could play in, and it is worth being honest that the line moved on long ago. Nike Air arrived from the 2, and later models added carbon fibre shank plates for torsional stiffness, Kevlar reinforced laces and uppers on the 15, Flyknit from the 30 and a laceless FastFit system on the 33. Signature athletes including Jayson Tatum, Zion Williamson and Luka Doncic play in current models, not in this one. The Retro High OG survives as a design object and a wardrobe shoe, which is a more durable job than the one it was originally built for.

The Retro High OG keeps the original build: separate leather panels for toe cap, eyestay, quarter and heel, stitched over one another on a foam midsole, a rubber outsole with the pivot circle at the forefoot, and the Wings logo, the basketball with wings that marked the line's earliest era, on the tall collar. Putting royal on the toe places the saturated colour on the panel that creases hardest, so the wear pattern will be most obvious exactly where you look first. High tops are stiff out of the box, with a firm heel counter and a leather tongue, and they need a fortnight of wear before the collar settles around the ankle.