The Goth Tabi Ballerina Barefoot Sneaker That Earns Every Adjective
A chimera of all that is timely in the world of sneakers, Nike's Air Rift sneaker is actually quite old. Not that you'd know it from the Air Rift "Buckle Strap" shoes tippy-toeing into the spotlight.
These all-black tabi-toed Mary Janes borrow all that helped their flat-footed 1996 ancestor, Nike's prescient take on the barefoot running sneaker, become so special before subjecting it to a coquettecore makeover.
Nike's Air Rift "Buckle Strap" mutates the Air Rift's shape in a wild way, all while still looking impressively excellent.
It retains the cross-foot strap, mesh paneling, and split toes of the OG but it also straps on a variety of hardware'd buckles that add an edgier Simone Rocha-ish element to the shoe's overall make.
Delicate strips of leather blossom around this artful Air Rift, lending a feminine edge to this already quite stacked sneaker, which is possibly the most out-there Air Rift ever designed.
Not that it doesn't have some stiff competition.
While this isn't the first of the Air Rift's more left-of-center renewals, the "Buckle Strap" Air Rift is hardly the first-ever weirdo Nike ballerina tabi either.
As a matter of fact, last year's ribbon-laced Air Rifts took balletcore to even further extremes, making the titular "Buckle Strap" iteration feel quite goth by comparison.
With ASICS doing split toes, both PUMA and adidas doing Mary Janes, and the rest of the world trying to outdo each others' ballet sneakers, it was really only a matter of time before someone'd come along to purée all these trendy references together.
But with the Air Rift, a canvas as predestined for this cause as any other shoe, it's no wonder that Nike's most delicate of all pirouettes would command that stage and steal the show.
