Hiroshi Fujiwara on his latest Nike collab: ‘I don’t like to explain what I’m doing’

Hiroshi Fujiwara is perhaps the most dramatically lit person I’ve ever interviewed on Zoom.

Joining me at his preferred time (midnight) from Tokyo, the man known as the godfather of streetwear—who launched his own label at 26, was among the first hip-hop DJs in Japan, wrote a regular column for Popeye, and now runs his own consultancy, Fragment—has met with me to discuss his latest collaborations with Nike.

But when I dig in, asking about the hidden details lurking in his shoes? He admits, “I don’t really want to talk about it,” without an ounce of rudeness. “Sometimes, if you see a movie and you don’t really get the ending, you have to guess what [the creators] think. I like that kind of situation.”

In a world of overt and overstated sneaker collabs, Fujiwara prefers to operate with a soft touch. The semiotics of streetwear like much of fashion are born from winks and nods—an “if you know you know” mentality. His three new pieces for Nike celebrate that. At the same time, Fujiwara insists he isn’t only trying to build enigmas that “people can investigate it forever.” When he visits Nike, he still designs the shoes he’d like to wear.

“I always like black shoes!”

His three new shoes start with his take on Nike’s new Air Liquid Max (April 1, $225)—an organic expansion of its Air Max technology, where the air bubbles almost seem to melt or morph underfoot like the toes of a tree frog. He didn’t touch the materiality or the silhouette. And you’ll need to squint to notice the light white text like “Fragment Concept Testing” on the side. But he turned the swoosh chrome, and filled the three printed layers of pigment on top of the shoe with various flavors of black. I imagine that in person it almost shimmers like snakeskin (which wouldn’t be the first or even second time Fujiwara used animal textures on a sneaker). 

“I always like black shoes!” Fujiwara says. “I like colorful shoes also, but I wanted to have the black one for myself. Especially that shoe. I always like those air bag shoes. Many [designers] want to do the Jordan 1, Air Force One, or Dunk. No one really want to touch the newest things. I always do that.”

For the Mind 001 (March 18, $95)—Nike’s brain-calming slide shoe, which uses little nubs in the bottom to activate a sense of mindfulness—Fujiwara also wanted to go with black. But for the nubs, he chose blue. Black and “military blue” are the trademark colors of Fragment. 

“Small details are really, really important. I see some comments, people say, ‘Oh, it’s only changing color’; ‘It’s only little things,’” Fujiwara says. “But the little things are really important, especially for the shoe. Like even 1 millimeter really makes it different.”

Indeed, the Mind 001 reads completely differently in black—ready to outfit an ensemble of broody technical garments beloved by corners of the fashion scene—in a way that the Mind 001’s original infrared and orange colorway did not. 

Yet black and blue seem like the worst colors to use to stand out: an almost stubborn choice on Fujiwara’s part to squint through their universality to see his fingerprint. Is there more to them? When I asked about his exact approach to blue at Fragment, he did share more on its origins.

“The first Air Jordan I had in the ’80s—the original Air Jordan 1—that was black and blue,” Fujiwara says. “And I always like black and blue.” The shoe left such an imprint on his mind that he adopted Nike’s colorways for himself, which he occasionally, circuitously, reapplies to the brand. 

An excuse to look closer

Fujiwara’s collaborations with Nike trace back to the ’90s—at one point, he even teamed up with Nike design god Tinker Hatfield and CEO Mark Parker on a special line called HTM (Hiroshi, Tinker, Mark). He’s always seen his role as translating Nike’s performance approach to a more fashion-forward audience. Fujiwara himself flagged his use of “croc leather” on an Air Force 1 as being the sort of polarizing choice even Nike’s designers didn’t get at the time (about 20 years later, it seems like a downright common treatment to realize a luxe sneaker). 

“When I started working for Nike with a collaboration in the late ’90s, there were many rules. You couldn’t touch a swoosh. And at first, it was difficult. But then I got used to it, and I kind of started enjoying it,” Fujiwara says. “Nike already had their own creative design, so I don’t want to mess around too much. . . . I talk to the designers, I like to respect what they do.”

That mentality carries across Fujiwara’s collaborations and projects. He keeps his design simple. He keeps his staff simple. He keeps his business simple. Fragment is a creative team of three, which ensures he doesn’t have the overhead and payroll of managing his own brand. 

But I’ll admit that I appreciate it when Fujiwara takes a firmer touch with Nike’s silhouettes, as he demonstrated with his Nike Mind 002 (March 18, $140).

He requested a new upper made of Flyknit, while breaking free of black and blue by introducing a second color scheme in “particle gray.” A closer look reveals more nuance. The top of the shoe is fuzzy—almost reading like fleece. All of that softness is caged by a one-pull performance lace system, managed with Fragment’s own tooling that can lock down the shoe like a bolo tie. 

While the silhouette itself stays the same, Fujiwara introduced a new sock liner that raises the heel of the shoe, giving it more forward momentum than what we see in the Mind 002 (a silhouette that I’ve thought looks stuck in place, given that its outsole and upper peak in the center like a triangle). Sneaker critics have been gushing about Fujiwara’s approach to the Mind 002, and his most overt statement is what fans appear to want. But ultimately, Fujiwara asks that you keep looking closer.

“When I was really young, the information I had was just pictures in magazines. Like, pictures of my favorite people. I’d want to see, what do they have in the closet? Or what do they have on posters? Those kinds of small details,” he says. “But many people [don’t get there now] because they have so much information already.”

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