About The Design: Air Max 1 Union

Hi, I am Milo Hanssen and I have been an intern shoemaker here at VIJZ for the last half year.

For the ending of my internship i got to create my own one-of-one, I had an old cargo pants laying around at home and had been wanting to use that for a while.

Since I wanted to use the material as much as possible, I thought it would be best to use it mostly for the mudguard. This gave me the idea to create an Airmax 1 ‘Union LA’.

I took the Air Jordan 1 ‘Union’ and converted it to an Air Max 1.

A detail i really liked about that shoe is the painted edges, I definitely was going to use that in my sneaker.

Within this design I played a lot with all the techniques I learned during my internship such as laser engraving and embroidery.

On the heel I engraved the Nike Air logo and painted it yellow afterwards, to make it look like the red leather is yellow on the inside.

The mudguard, U-throat and part of the tongue are made from the old pants reinforced on a nice yellow suede which you can see on the edges of these patterns.

Here you can see the stitching process of the mudguard, this step really shows what the shoe is going to look like when it’s done.

The toebox is made of very nice tumbled leather with the Jordan 1 perforations.

I also used a zigzag stitch to connect the collar to the quarters.

The insoles of the Jordan 1 version has a couple of drawings and notes on it, so I recreated this with drawings of an Air Max 1 and VIJZ references. It’s a small detail but in my opinion that’s what really makes a sneaker pop.

For the sockliner I used a grey mesh material, this part is stitched in backwards and will be flipped once the collarfoam is glued in.

After it’s flipped the liner will be stitched through the quarters to really secure it in place.

When the sockliner is glued in and the tongue is attached, the lasting process can begin. Because of the extremely thick mudguard this was quite the task, but by constantly compairing left and right I got them to be exactly the same.

After the lasting, the glueing of the sole can begin. First I made a marking for where the sole will be sitting, then I carefully glue exactly to the edge of this marking.

When the glue dried, I heated it with a special machine to activate the glue and stick on the soles.

This was my process for the Air Max 1 ‘Union LA’, hope you enjoyed it. Available at July 4, 5:00 PM CET.