A new exhibition goes behind the scenes at the world’s most worshipped sports brand

Amidst the sheer scale of its global success, it’s easy to forget that Nike, the world’s leading sports brand, did in fact have quite a humble start. Founded by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman in 1964, a college runner and his coach, originally going under the name “blue ribbon sports”, the brand’s beginnings consisted of producing, marketing and selling their first product — none other than the famous waffle trainers. Nicknamed the ‘moon shoe’ its development began, as many great ideas do, on a kitchen table.

Visitors to the brand’s debut exhibition Nike: Form Follows Motion, opening on 21 September 2024 at the Vitra Design Museum, will encounter such stories from Nike’s earliest days — from the making of the first waffle sole to the origins of the brand’s famous swoosh logo, all the way to the development of its most iconic products such as Air Max and Fly Knit. The extensive display traces the brand’s five century development in order to examine “Nike’s involvement with technological innovation and social change”, with the lens that the brand is not only the globally successful company we all know it to be but instead, a “whole design culture”.

Initiated and produced by the museum and curated by Glenn Adamson, the focus of the exhibition is on Nike’s design history. The display aims to offer a window into Nike’s design processes across the ages, showcasing prototypes, experiments, sketches, material samples, and more. Having opened its archive for the very first time for external research to the museum, the show “offers a unique opportunity to focus on design through the lens of a single brand, and to display fascinating objects that illustrate the process of design development — some of which have never been shown before”, says Mateo Kries, director of the Vitra Design Museum. The show hopes to “emphasise the importance of sports for design innovation and social change, while also shedding a light on the almost mythical devotion to sneakers and sportswear in popular culture.”

Nike’s archive consists of over 200,000 items, a number of which have been carefully curated into a display in three parts: ‘Track’, ‘Air’ and ‘Sensation’. Whilst ‘Track’ delves into the brand’s coach-runner start-up, highlighting one of its key design principles from the formative period: “always listen to the voice of the athlete”, ‘Air’ dives straight into the 80s when Nike launched Nike Air and the brand’s campaigns and advertising with athletes like Micheal Jordan, Serena Williams and LeBron James in collaboration with Wieden+Kennedy really took off. The third section ‘Sensation’ provides an insight into the Nike Sports Research Lab, “one of the world’s largest, most advanced facilities for the study of the body in motion”, where a lot of the development for Nike’s designs have taken place over the years, as well as Nike’s more current research in the field of materials and sustainability. In a culmination of the exhibition, and the concluding section, the display finally reflects on Nike’s collaborations with “external designers, athletes, and its own public” and the brand’s exponential influence on popular culture.

Sharing the team’s learnings from the gathering of the contents of the exhibit, curator Glenn Adamson shares: “Nike was a pacesetter in graphic design from the 1980s onwards.” A highlight of the exhibition’s content, according to the curatorial team, might have been the story of the Swoosh logo itself. An emblem that cost them only 35 dollars to make at the time, the brand’s logo was famously designed by college student Carolyn Davidson in 1972. According to Glen, Nike’s archives revealed the subtle changes in the use of the symbol from its earliest days accompanied by the brand name everywhere until Nike reaches “universal recognisability” and the symbol is always seen in isolation. “Now in the 21st century, we have an era of further experimentation, with the Swoosh being multiplied, enlarged and otherwise manipulated. It’s now such an icon that Nike’s designers and external collaborators can be increasingly free and playful with it, because they know that powerful identification with the brand will still be there.”

The display is open from the 21 September 2024 – 4 May 2025 at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Following its premiere, Nike: Form Follows Motion is set to travel further afield to a number of international museum venues.