In 1978, political activist and designer Gilbert Baker created, hand dyed and hand sewed two flags with eight Nike Air Max 270 Damen colored stripes (pink, red, orange, yellow, green, Nike Air Max 90 Womens turquoise, blue and violet) to be a positive symbol that would unite gay, Nike Air Force 1 Womenslesbian and transgender people. He called it the Pride Flag and debuted it that year in San Francisco.
The community loved the flag. And organizers of San Francisco’s Pride Parade determined it would be a powerful look to line the entire route of the 1979 event with four colors on one side of the street and four on the other. With $10,000 Nike Air VaporMax Mujer and an ask for 400 handmade flags, Baker went to work. But the flag company helping to make the flags could not come up with enough pink fabric, so he had to remove pink from the flag. To make it an even split for the parade reveal, he removed turquoise from the flag.
Forty years later, the six-color flag remains the ultimate global symbol of unity among the LGBTQIA+ community.
To celebrate Baker’s impact and memorialize his legacy, Nike partnered with the Gilbert Baker Estate, working Nike Air Max 97 Femme hand-in-hand to create this year’s 2019 BETRUE collection. For the first time, the footwear, apparel and accessories all feature the icon’s original eight-color flag, as well as other meaningful “Gilbert-y” touches and symbols of Pride.In a career spanning 24 years, Serena Williams has defined herself as a champion in many roles — as a mother, a woman,Nike Air Max 90 Mujer an athlete and a barrier-breaking icon. Williams’ full persona inspires designer Virgil Abloh, who channels her pioneering spirit through a cape-jacket designed in collaboration with Nike.Translated from French, the words printed on the cape-jacket are “Mother, Champion, Queen, Goddess.”
The material was developed for Serena by Nike as a performance seersucker nicknamed “Ever.” (Conversely, her sea-green bodysuit for Nike Air Force 1 Mujer Melbourne was made out of a Nike-specific material nicknamed Nike Air VaporMax Womens “Greatest.”"I love when fashion becomes a vehicle for sharing a powerful message. With Nike and Virgil, we've created pieces that aim to inspire a new generation of athletes everywhere," says Williams.
In addition to the cape-jacket, Abloh and Nike have created a limited-edition T-shirt and hat. Shown above, these items will release on nike.com in Europe and North America and sell at Nike Champs-Elysees and P75 in Paris once Serena takes the court.Extending Nike’s longstanding history of unique prints and patterns, the summer 2019 NikeCourt collection uses an 18th-century art form to decorate the apparel for Paris. A toile print depicts pastoral scenes of skeletons amid tennis-specific details, including a served ball, a dapper spectator and more. Other details are specific to Nike (check out the Swoosh on the skeletons' shoes) Nike Air Force 1 Womens and its World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, like the trees and geese that populate its campus. The design appears through vignettes scattered over black and white bases of knit fabric on the NikeCourt men's polo and the women’s long-sleeve top.
“We wanted to play off the history of the area in an unexpected way,” says Abby Swancutt, NikeCourt Global Design Director. “We saw a big opportunity pairing a classic French motif within a traditional sport like tennis. When you see the toile pattern, you’re expecting something from the past, but in reality, we’ve infused playful elements from Nike's history, and in turn, put it on performance fabrics to make it modern