Nike executive who designed iconic Air Jordan basketball shoe
Peter Moore, who helped revolutionize sneaker culture in the mid-1980s with his design of the remarkably popular Nike Air Jordan, died April 29 in Portland, Ore. He was 78.
His wife, Christina, confirmed the death, in a hospital. She was not sure of the cause, she said, but noted that he had Parkinson’s disease and Ménière’s disease, a disorder of the inner ear.
Mr. Moore was part of a small group of Nike executives who began working with Michael Jordan shortly after he was chosen third overall in the 1984 NBA draft by the Chicago Bulls out of the University of North Carolina. Their signature creation was the Air Jordan 1, a basketball sneaker that became a sales phenomenon soon after its release in 1985. Since then, there has been a new iteration every year, even after Mr. Jordan’s retirement in 2003, and the shoe has become a valuable collectible.
“It represents a watershed moment, bringing sneaker culture and sneaker interest to a broader audience,” Elizabeth Semmelhack, creative director at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and curator of the 2013 exhibition “Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture,” said.
Mr. Moore designed the shoe with input from Mr. Jordan, who craved one that would be exciting and low to the ground so that he could feel the floor. One of its major features was a pocket of compressed air in its sole, to cushion impact.
But its colors — along with the Nike swoosh — were what truly made the shoe stand out.
“The idea was to break the color barrier in footwear,” Mr. Moore wrote in his book “Peter Moore: A Portfolio” (1995). “Prior to that, 99% of shoes were white or black, so I decided to design a shoe that would really take color well. And the colors were red, black and white.
“I didn’t pick those colors. That’s the colors of the Chicago franchise.”
According to Mr. Moore, Mr. Jordan was not happy with the red, black and white combination, calling it “the devil’s colors” because it was the color scheme worn by teams at longtime UNC rival North Carolina State. He preferred the Carolina blue of his college uniform.
But the three colors stuck, and Nike widely advertised the sneaker throughout Mr. Jordan’s rookie season, when he averaged 28.2 points a game and was voted rookie of the year. The shoe, made of premium leather, was released to stores in March 1985 in two variations — red, black and white ( the “Game Shoe”), and red and black (“The Outlaw”) — and sold for $65 (the equivalent of about $175 today; Air Jordans are now listed at $185 on the Nike website).
Sales of the sneaker that first year totaled $126 million, far beyond Nike’s expectations, David Falk, Mr. Jordan’s agent, said.
The shoes were adorned with a logo that was also created by Mr. Moore: a winged basketball with the words “Air Jordan” arcing over it. The idea for the logo came to Mr. Moore in a meeting in 1984 in Washington with Falk and Rob Strasser, Nike’s vice president and director of marketing.
When Mr. Falk suggested the name Air Jordan, to reflect the way Mr. Jordan seemed to soar and hang in the air, Mr. Moore made some rough sketches. He then made refinements during the flight back to Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., after spotting a child passenger with a set of captain’s wings on his shirt.
Mr. Moore also designed the Air Jordan 2, with Bruce Kilgore; the Nike Dunk basketball shoe, which later became popular among skateboarders; and the Jumpman logo, which he created in 1987 as a more sophisticated successor to the winged basketball. The Jumpman, a dramatic Jordan silhouette adapted from a Life magazine photograph, shows Mr. Jordan in flight, his legs wide apart, a ball in his left hand.
Jumpman remains a symbol of the Jordan Brand of footwear and apparel, which accounted for $4.7 billion of Nike’s $44.5 billion in revenues in its 2021 fiscal year.
In addition to his wife, who was Christine Hummel when he married her, Mr. Moore is survived by his sons, Hagen, Dylan and Devin; four granddaughters; a sister, Mary- lin Ryan; and a brother, Michael.
When Nike was wooing Mr. Jordan in 1984, a group of company executives went to dinner with him and his family at a restaurant in downtown Portland.
As he watched Mr. Jordan enter, David Halberstam wrote in “Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made” (1999), Mr. Moore noticed a “tall, handsome, innately graceful” presence,” a kind of “young American prince.”
“The scene was nothing less than an epiphany for Peter Moore, for the voltage of the young man’s smile was unique,” Halberstam wrote. “As Jordan smiled, race simply fell away. Michael was no longer a Black man, he was just someone you wanted to be with, someone you wanted to be your friend.”