The Sneaker That Caused a Riot, Hung in a Gallery, and Made Collaboration the Rule

I. Building the shoe: 1985 and the "Be True to Your School" era

Fresh off designing the Air Jordan 1 in 1985, Nike designer Peter Moore sketched a new basketball silhouette for Nike's College Colors program, an initiative built around a simple idea: put college teams' actual colors on the feet of their fans. The shoe was originally called the "College Color High," and like most Nike basketball shoes of the era, it was a mash-up: the outsole borrowed traction from the Air Jordan 1, the upper blended the Jordan 1 and the Nike Terminator, and the last came from the Nike Legend — considered the best-fitting basketball last of the time.

-> Shop 1985 Air Jordan 1 High Chicago Here

Twelve schools anchored the launch: UNLV, Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Georgetown, Syracuse, Kentucky, and others, each getting the high-top in their own team palette, sold under the tagline "Be True to Your School." At a time when NBA rules kept basketball shoes deliberately muted, the Dunk's bright, team-coded color-blocking was a genuine departure — arguably the first time a basketball shoe was designed to be as much about identity as performance.

This 1985 Dunk Low "Iowa" salesman sample, in the school's signature colors, marked and dated to November 1985 and produced at the Tong Yang Rubber factory — a sample built not for retail but to sell the shoe internally, to Nike's own sales network, before the "Be True to Your School" campaign ever reached a store shelf. It's about as close as you can get to the Dunk's actual birth certificate.

-> Shop 1985 Dunk Low 'Iowa' Salesman Sample Here

The shoe rode the college-basketball wave through the mid-'80s, then largely dropped off Nike's radar through the '90s. It didn't disappear from feet, though — skaters kept wearing Dunks well after Nike stopped paying attention, partly because they were cheap and plentiful from overproduction, and partly because the flat sole and low profile happened to suit a skateboard better than it suited a basketball court.

Nike eventually noticed. In 2001, Sandy Bodecker was put in charge of what would become Nike SB, and rather than invent something new, his team went back to the Dunk and re-engineered it for skating: a grippier outsole, Zoom Air cushioning, and the now-famous padded "fat tongue" to protect skaters' feet from board impact. The Nike SB Dunk Low officially launched in March 2002, backed by real skaters like Reese Forbes, Gino Iannucci, Richard Mulder, and Danny Supa, each given their own signature colorway in what became known as the "Colors By" series. Within months, outside collaborators like Supreme were designing onto the shoe too. The Dunk had become a platform other people could build on — which is exactly the door that opened onto what came next.

II. The exhibition - White Dunk: Evolution of an Icon

In October 2003, Nike took the idea of the Dunk as a canvas and made it literal.

White Dunk: Evolution of an Icon was a traveling exhibition that handed 25 Japanese artists, illustrators, toy-makers, and sculptors a single brief: take a blank white Nike Dunk and reinterpret it as a piece of contemporary art. It debuted at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, timed to Paris Fashion Week, before touring to Tokyo and a U.S. premiere at LACE in Los Angeles. The results ranged from figurative sculpture to comic-inspired illustration.

-> Shop 2004 'White Dunk' Archival Poster, Catalogue, and Laces Here

The roster read like a who's-who of Japanese pop and fantasy art. Nike executive Mark Parker personally selected the 25 participants, hand-picking highly talented Japanese artists whose disciplines rarely overlapped with sneaker culture. The brief pushed each artist toward highly personal interpretations — Yasuhito Udagawa, for instance, built his piece around an American slang meaning of "dunk," picturing a donut being dipped into coffee rather than a basketball move. Other artists include Hajime Sorayama (left 1), the illustrator famous for his chrome-plated "hyper illustrated" pin-ups, alongside Yuji Oniki, Yasushi Nirasawa, Junichi Taniguchi, Keiichi Sato, and Masakazu Katsura. The show's cultural crossover was cemented by fashion press coverage: writing for the International Herald Tribune, critic Suzy Menkes singled out the installation as the standout of Paris Fashion Week that season, calling it proof that sneakers had become part of fashion's religion.

Tied to each stop on the tour, Nike also released a city-specific retail SB Dunk — a separate, companion object rather than one of the exhibited artworks themselves. Paris referenced French painter Bernard Buffet, with hand-rendered artwork so that no two retail pairs matched.

Tokyo went the other way. Where Paris covered the shoe, the Tokyo release emptied it out — and it is the single clearest statement of what the whole exhibition was arguing.

The Nike SB Dunk Low "Tokyo" doesn't have a Swoosh on the heel. It doesn't have a branded tongue. It's rendered almost entirely in a single tonal muslin, stripped back so far that it barely reads as a "colorway" at all — just canvas, gum sole, and shape. Released via lottery in Tokyo in early 2004, in a run of roughly 202 pairs, it's one of the rarest Dunks ever made. But rarity isn't really the point. The "Tokyo" is the moment the Dunk stopped being decorated and started being emptied out — treated as a surface so pure that removing things from it became the design statement.

→Shop Nike SB Dunk Low 'Tokyo' Here

That single idea of the Dunk as a blank canvas, waiting for someone else's story to be written on it, is the through line for everything that follows: different decades, different authors, the same shoe underneath.

Designed by Jeff Staple of Staple Design as the city release in the same lineage as Paris and Tokyo, the "Pigeon" Dunk took its concept from an unglamorous muse: the ordinary street pigeon, rendered in mottled grey-and-black plumage across the upper, with an embroidered patch at the heel. Just 150 pairs existed worldwide, split 30 apiece across five New York boutiques, with Staple's own shop, Reed Space on Orchard Street, individually laser-etching and numbering its allotment. On February 22, 2005, that scarcity collided with word-of-mouth hype in a way nobody — including Staple — anticipated: a line that had been a modest 20 or 30 campers the night before swelled past a hundred by morning, and what started as a sneaker release ended as a near-riot, with police confiscating bats, knives, and even a machete from the crowd, and escorting lucky buyers out the back door to waiting cabs.

→ Sell Nike Dunk Pigeon with JOOPITER Here

London was supposed to close the tour. After what happened on Orchard Street, Nike scrapped the event entirely — the 202 pairs made for the occasion surfaced later, quietly, through the London boutique Foot Patrol, with no show ever attached to them. The city series that began in a Paris museum ended with a shoe nobody was allowed to celebrate.

That single idea of the Dunk as a blank canvas, waiting for someone else's story to be written on it  is the through line for everything that follows. In different decades, representing different authors, with the same shoe underneath. 

III. The other canvas, same winter: the Artist Series

The exhibition wasn't the only place Nike was handing the Dunk to outsiders. Running in parallel, the Artist Series — begun in 2003 — gave the shoe to figures from outside sport entirely: graffiti writer ESPO, actress Halle Berry, and, in January 2004, Pharrell Williams with his band N.E.R.D.

The N.E.R.D. Dunk High was rendered in black embossed leather, its texture drawn from the stingray-skin watch bands used by De Grisogono, with a metallic silver Swoosh and the band's brain logo embroidered at heel and tongue in place of any Nike branding. Limited to 1,050 individually numbered pairs, it sold out almost immediately.

The timing is the interesting part. In the same season Nike was inviting 25 Japanese artists to reinterpret a blank Dunk in a Paris museum, it was handing the same blank shoe to a band from Virginia Beach — two entirely different theories of who gets to be an author, running at once. And the N.E.R.D. pair is less a sneaker collaboration than a preview of the instinct that would eventually become JOOPITER itself: treat a cultural object as a vehicle for someone's specific taste.

→ Shop Nike Dunk High “N.E.R.D” Here

IV. The Dunk since: still a canvas, still collecting authors

Nike SB Dunk Low "Freddy Krueger" Prototype (2007). Not every chapter in the Dunk's canvas history got to exist in public. Nike developed this design as a nod to the horror icon, only for a rights dispute over the Freddy Krueger likeness to shut the project down before release — nearly the entire run was ordered destroyed. A small number of prototype samples survived, unboxed because prototypes never shipped in boxes to begin with. JOOPITER's pair, sample code 999999999, is one of them: the rarest kind of rare — a shoe the public was never meant to see at all.

→ Shop Nike Dunk Low SB 'Freddy Krueger' Prototype Here

Four decades, four completely different eras — a college marketing gimmick, a skate-shop reinvention, a fine-art exhibition — and one shoe running underneath all of it, still doing the same job it did in that Tokyo release: staying just blank enough for the next story to be written on it.