VITRA museum unlocks NIKE's secret design archives

Nike: Form Follows Motion opens at vitra design museum

With NIKE: Form Follows Motion, VITRA Design Museum will present the first comprehensive exhibition about the world’s most revered sports brand. The focus is on NIKE‘s design history, tracing a five-decade ascent from a grassroots start-up to a global phenomenon. This includes the company’s beginnings in the 1960s, the design of its famous ‘swoosh’ logo, as well as iconic products such as Air Max and Flyknit, and current research devoted to future materials and sustainability. Following the Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games in Paris as well as the European Football Championship in Germany, the museum will emphasize the importance of sports for design innovation and social change while also shedding light on the almost mythical devotion to sneakers and sportswear in popular culture and social media.

Rolling stacks, Department of NIKE Archives (DNA), Beaverton, Oregon, 2024 © NIKE, Inc.

image by Alastair Philip Wiper

tracing the history of the world’s largest apparel company

NIKE, named after the Greek goddess of victory, has become the world’s leading sports brand since its incorporation in 1972. Today, it is also the world’s largest apparel company, with an annual revenue of more than $50 billion. Beyond a successful company, NIKE also embodies a whole design culture with its dynamic display of innovative materials, performance features, and high-impact graphics. At the company’s headquarters, just outside Portland, Oregon, products are developed through a unique blend of scientific study, sports research, and aesthetic sensibility. Hundreds of designers there collaborate with specialists in other fields, from material engineering to biology to body mechanics — and with the world’s best athletes.

Documents wait to be refiled at the Department of NIKE Archives (DNA), Beaverton, Oregon, 2024, © NIKE, Inc.

image by Alastair Philip Wiper

first-time look at the brand’s design archives

For the first time, NIKE: Form Follows Motion gives a peek behind the scenes of this unique design laboratory while examining the brand’s involvement with technological innovation and social change. Most of the exhibits are sourced from the Department of NIKE Archives (DNA), the company’s archive comprising more than 200,000 items. The exhibition at VITRA Design Museum is the first to present a curated selection from this archive to the public. Among the exhibits are rarities and one-offs, including experimental prototypes of iconic sneaker models like the Waffle trainer, the Air Force One, and Shox, and original design studies for shoes and apparel.

The show also highlights the significant role of individual designers, both within the company like Diane Katz, Tinker Hatfield, and Eric Avar, and external collaborators like Marc Newson, Comme des Garçons, and Virgil Abloh. However, it’s not just designers who shape NIKE’s products. Athletes, from the world’s greatest to the everyday, have played a crucial role in the brand’s design process. Their experiences and requirements are integrated into product development, reflecting NIKE’s commitment to meeting the needs of its users.

Various lasts, jigs, silicon pads and fixtures, Advanced Product Creation Center (APCC), Beaverton, Oregon, 2024, © NIKE, Inc. | image by Alastair Philip Wiper

four chronological nike sections at vitra design museum

Curated by Glenn Adamson, the VITRA Design Museum exhibition features four chronological sections. The first one, Track, delves into the NIKE archive’s earliest holdings. The company was founded by two men: Phil Knight, a runner in college, and his former coach, Bill Bowerman. Their early employees — and most of their customers — were mainly serious amateurs and collegiate runners, with a few professionals helping to promote the brand. Marketing was hands-on, with sales representatives taking shoes to track meets. In this formative period, NIKE established one of its key design principles: always listen to the voice of the athlete. In this part of the exhibition, visitors will encounter stories from the brand’s earliest days, such as the development of the first Waffle Sole in co-founder Bill Bowerman’s kitchen or the story of the Tennessee State University Tigerbelles, a team of black female athletes during the civil rights era in the United States.

Key Visual NIKE: Form Follows Motion | © Vitra Design Museum, graphic design: Daniel Streat, Visual Fields

The second exhibition chapter, Air, looks at the 1980s when NIKE achieved take-off. Through endorsements with star athletes like Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, and LeBron James, the company established itself as a prime mover in popular culture. At the same time, NIKE transcended its origins in track and field, expanding first into basketball, then tennis, global football, skateboarding, and other sports. Its designs became pop culture fixtures, thanks to a crafty understanding of the street-style landscape. Classics like the Air Force 1 and the Air Jordan were featured in imaginative TV commercials (mostly by the Portland-based ad firm Wieden + Kennedy).

At the same time, the company was investing in a new technology: capsules of pressurized gas that provided cushioning without adding weight. Initially concealed inside footwear soles, NIKE Air was first made visible in the 1987 Air Max, opening up a new chapter in the company’s design history. In the exhibition, the fascinating evolution of the Air sole is illustrated with numerous artifacts from the initial development process, including airbag prototypes and a testing machine created by engineer Frank Rudy, who first developed the technology and proposed it to NIKE.

Early Mechanical Shox Prototype, 1981, © NIKE, Inc.

The third space, Sensation, explains some of the research and development behind NIKE’s designs. Here, visitors get an insight into the heart of the NIKE Sport Research Lab, one of the world’s largest and most advanced facilities for the study of the body in motion. Since the 1990s, this technical research has increasingly focused on the advancing athletic potential, leading to products like the NIKE Free, which simulates the feel of barefoot running, and the Vaporfly, developed as part of an effort to break the two-hour barrier in the marathon.

The VITRA Design Museum gallery shows the impact of material innovations like Flyknit on both performance and sustainability. It explores current efforts by NIKE to reduce climate impact through ethical material sourcing and circular manufacturing techniques. Research into plastic recycling is also examined in this section, with examples including NIKE Grind —a granulate of recycled items used for various purposes — as well as the company’s journey from the first recycling projects in the early 2000s to current initiatives.

The culmination of the VITRA Design Museum exhibition, Relation, reflects on collaborations by NIKE with external designers, athletes, and its public. The gallery showcases fifty examples of intriguing and sometimes outrageous footwear from NIKE’s history; some developed through collaborations with fashion designers and creatives, others within community-based projects. The room also examines NIKE’s eminent role in pop and counterculture, which materializes in music videos or Social Media footage showing its critical role in shaping and reflecting new trends and values. This section underlines that the symbiosis of design and sports has always been about more than just performance. It is also about reflecting the ideals of the human body, well-being, diversity, and equality, and, ultimately, the human’s deep aim is to push boundaries and discover new territory.

Tabletop covered with objects from Frank Rudy who invented the Air Technology, Department of NIKE Archives (DNA), Beaverton, Oregon, 2024, © NIKE, Inc. | image by Alastair Philip Wiper

‘In addition to our interest in the evolution of iconic products, we will look at the larger social and historical context surrounding NIKE. Over the past 50 years, sport has had a tremendous impact on our perception of the human body, beyond the track and the court — for example, on conceptions of gender roles. Our exhibition will show how the company has both instigated and responded to these changing dynamics, from its initial emphasis on performance and optimization to greater diversity and inclusion. By looking at NIKE’s design strategies, we gain insights into that bigger cultural picture,’ reflects Glenn Adamson.

NIKE: Form Follows Motion will be guided by a broad range of events and workshops on sports and design. Following its premiere at the VITRA Design Museum, the exhibition will travel to further international museum venues. It will also be accompanied by a publication featuring most exhibits and essays by scholars Sam Grawe, Adam Bradley, William Myers, Jared Dalcourt, and Ligaya Salazar. The book is lavishly illustrated with around 300 historical and contemporary images, portraying the headquarters’ design and production facilities and the Department of NIKE Archives (DNA).