Flyknit may be very well experiencing a renaissance.
In the ‘00s, Nike was desperately trying to come up with an innovation that could do it all: cut weight, perfect fit, provide breathability and reduce waste compared to cut-and-sew uppers. Then in 2012, the footwear brand debuted Flyknit, expanding on the Flywire cables from a few years prior with a material that stretched over the entire upper.
For a while, we saw the fabric all across Nike’s catalog, from runners to basketball shoes to lifestyle sneakers. But knit uppers were quickly becoming an industry standard and, in recent years, Flyknit has seen a significant drop in usage.
However, that all might be shifting.
Super fly(knit)
It seemed like a one-off phenomenon when Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Fragment put a new, fashion-forward Flyknit on the already-viral Mind 002 sneaker (and Mind 001 slide). This wasn’t Fujiwara’s first go-round with Flyknit, having been part of the legendary HTM design collective a decade earlier, along with Tinker Hatfield and Mark Parker. Nevertheless, this new take was different.
Made more for lifestyle wear, the Fragment Flyknit wasn’t performance-focused; it was trendy and aesthetically denser, albeit short-lived. We thought it might be some time before this sort of new-wave Flyknit would appear on another Nike shoe, let alone the Mind 002.
