As Nike started to witness the massive success the Dunk had with the skateboard community and Nike starting its Skateboard division Nike SB.
However, Nike struggled with its newly founded Skateboard division, with its struggle Nike tried out numerous ideas and numerous models, however, almost all skateboard models met with minimal success, one particularly would be the infamous Nike Choad. It wasn’t until Sandy Bodecker came up with an incredible idea to engage the skater community. Whereby he enlisted four standout skateboarders Rese Forbes, Richard Mulder, Danny Spa, and Gino Iannucci.
With each skater now representing Nikes Skateboard division, Bodecker made sure to assign a dunk colourway for each skater, and to market such colourways in specific Skater community stores including LA, New York, and San Francisco. Bodecker visited local skate shops with the new dunk colourway “I-95” SB low Dunk, this specific new colourway highlighted the Dunks new SB features, such as sock liner and the padded tongue.
With the dunk now transformed into a skate shoe, the dunk is still at a core a dunk- a pure basketball shoe, this meant to differentiate itself, from its basketball predecessor, the colourway was imperative. The revamped sneaker was met with huge success.
The Nike Dunk reaching its prominence, a number of colourways were released, one of the most prominent would be the famous “Wu Tang Dunk” which in essence was an Iowa Dunk with an embroidered Wu tang W.
Nike released 36 pairs of the specific dunk, which was a node to the group’s album “Enter the Wu Tang” (36 chamber), which were gifted to Wu tang clan members and associates, an incredibly rare sneaker.
For years to come the Nike dunk had released numerous different sought-after colourways including the iconic MF DOOM Nike Dunk high. With the numerous releases catching the attention of sneakerheads and enthusiasts, collecting sought after dunks was at an all time high, with even international exclusives such as the CO.JP releases (Dunk colourways exclusive to Japan were suddenly on the radar)
Such releases created an unprecedented demand and had set the stage for the golden era of dunks. Over the years, the Nike dunk had maintained its popularity with noticeable releases.
However, by the mid 2000’s Jordan’s once again jumped out of the horizons, thanks the likes of Kanye and his Nike Yeezy line, Jordan’s’ once again overtook the Dunk, what seemed like priceless ‘grails’ by 2013 are now seen as sleepers on the sneaker market, it could be mainly speculated that the Adidas x Kanye Yeezy line added to the dunks second death.
By 2015, Nike re-released the mainline ‘Be True to your School’ colourways, with its 30th anniversary, though the colourways were not too out of the ordinary, it was the quality leather and the cut that was close to its 1985 predecessor, though slightly wider. This certainly put the dunks on every sneakerheads radar
With the mainline dunks fading away, various collaborations in which Nike partnered with creators and artists alike such as UNDFT, UNKLE, and STUSSY. This was just the beginning of the dunk hype train to begin as the collaborations such as the Late Virgil Abloh’s Off White dunks garnered much attention, along with the Hip Hop star Travis Scott, as he was spotted in numerous low-profile pairs.
Despite the dunk being forgotten about far too many times the dunk has once again risen to the top rotation of sneakerheads.
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