In the spring of 1985, an American sports fan could pick up a new pair of Nike Air Jordan 1s for $65. Fast-forward to the present and, this week, a pair of those same Jordans have garnered a $1.8m (£1.45m) bid at auction.
Those numbers don’t just speak to a meteoric rise of the Nike brand as a sportswear powerhouse now valued at more than £26bn; they also illustrate the cultural cachet that a pair of trainers can hold, shoes whose influence today extends far beyond the white-painted lines of the basketball court and into the world of music, fashion and even politics.
