Errolson Hugh on Acronym’s Nike Blazer: ‘You Can’t Expect People to Understand It at First’

srijeda , 09.02.2022.

Acronym’s version of the Nike Blazer Low, a sneaker frilled on its upper with angular incisions and augmented at the back with a screwed-on heel counter, took a protracted, twisting path toward its commercial launch.

“The shoe itself had a really long journey for a couple of reasons,” said Errolson Hugh, the designer and co-founder of technical apparel brand Acronym, tracing the story of his Blazers during a launch event at German sneaker boutique Solebox last weekend.

It began in May 2017 as a prototype made by gluing a paper shroud with X-Acto cuts onto an existing base sneaker, the Fragment x Undercover x Nike Match Classic. At one point, Acronym’s Blazer collaboration was meant to take shape on the Nike Killshot, but then that model rotated out of Nike’s calendar. For a time the samples wore a draw-cord system, an innovation borrowed from Jordan Brand, but it wasn’t performing as intended. Then a global pandemic interrupted the Blazers’ development. A colorway got canceled along the way.

The Blazers are a product of Hugh navigating through Nike to push its limitations and maneuvering past the obstacles of working alongside such a mammoth company.

“You have to be ready for that,” he tells Complex, “and it’s your ability to handle those types of setbacks that will determine the outcome of a project, possibly even more than the design itself.”

A backstory so intricate is appropriate for a sneaker from Acronym, a brand built on details. Its jackets read like an Escher layout of zippers and pockets, seam lines bouncing off each other to set up some impossible structure. Its sneakers with Nike have reflected this, pushing archival models in new directions.

The closest relative of the Acronym x Nike Blazer Low though is not the brand’s past Nike collaborations—its Lunar Force 1s or its patterned VaporMaxes—but the Undercover adaptation of the Nike Daybreak from 2019. At Solebox, Hugh described how that shoe inspired his latest.

That Daybreaks, like the reimagined Blazers after them, has a chunky piece of plastic jutting off its rear. Hugh said that Nike’s designers worked on the part for two years, originally creating a collapsible heel frame that allowed the wearer to step down and take the shoe on or off without having to use laces. But it was not sufficiently novel.

“Just before they were about to go to market,” Hugh explained, “legal was like, ‘Hey, there’s a patent violation, so we can’t actually release this shoe.’”

Nike’s designers fortified the heel piece with a plastic shank to keep it from collapsing, avoiding potential litigation and neutering its purpose. (Months after the shoes’ release, hands-free sneaker brand Kizik announced an investment from Nike that came with an intellectual property license.) Hugh, who’s lived in the shoes since their release, discovered in the Undercover x Nike Daybreak some vestigial functionality.

“With the particular way that the upper’s formed,” he said, “and with that shank inside there giving it the stiffness, you can just set the laces once and put your foot in there and step down and the part that prevents the tailgate from collapsing actually works almost like a shoehorn.”

With that, his Blazer Lows found their muse. Acronym’s take on the retro basketball shoe has ghillie-patterned cuts on its upper, a shoehorn-like lip at the collar, and clips on the heel that act as stand-ins for the Daybreak’s tailgate. Short of a proper FlyEase system, they enable a quick-on, quick-off entry.

The final result of a half-decade of design input and development will arrive this week. The Acronym x Nike Blazer Low releases will comprise two colorways of the shoes, which will be available first on Acronym’s website on Wednesday, Feb. 9, and then via SNKRS and Nike retailers the following day. The shoes are priced at $140. Their rollout features commissioned graphics from Japanese graffiti writer NESM. The collection also uses work from typographer David Rudnick.