Buckle Up, Nike’s COMME des GARÇONS Collab Is Getting Even Freakier

Over the course of a multi-decade partnership, the Japanese avant-garde house Comme des Garçons Homme Plus has routinely bypassed predictable silhouettes, choosing to dredge up Nike’s most obscure, polarizing, and forgotten experiments. For their latest runway statement, Rei Kawakubo’s team has reached into the deep late-90s Alpha Project era to find the Nike x Comme des Garçons Homme Plus Air Max Dolce SP.

Originally debuting in 1999 as a boundary-pushing training shoe defined by the lack of a traditional lacing system, the Dolce was generally considered too bizarre for the mainstream market at the turn of the millennium. 

Now, Comme des Garçons has streamlined its hyper-futuristic geometry, and thankfully hasn’t done anything to make the odd silhouette any more palatable for the general public. 

Swapping out the busy, original synthetic upper for a sleek, ultra-premium leather and mesh build, the sneaker features a stark color-blocking layout. The design relies on this striking, high-contrast monochrome execution to highlight the shoe's structure. This kind of simpe colorway has become a mainstay of Kawakubo’s Nike collaborations.

The main character of the silhouette is the massive, integrated shroud that completely replaces the tongue and laces, locking the foot down via a heavy-duty side zipper. The minimal branding is kept sophisticated, with subtle Nike Alpha Project five-dot logos hitting the heel and a clean CDG stamp on the insoles.

The arrival of the Air Max Dolce SP is far from an isolated experiment. At the Nike showroom during Paris Fashion Week, the Swoosh explicitly demonstrated that the brand is doubling down on out-there, hyper-conceptual, and structurally aggressive silhouettes for SS27. With the Air Max Dolce, Nike’s betting that the sneaker market is getting even freakier next year.

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