Starting with the colourway, a white leather base is overlaid with game royal suede and a patch of key lime green on the heel tab, nodding to the vibrant colours of the gardenia flowers sold on the street corners of Shanghai for decades. Jeff Han is making an effort to preserve Shanghai’s history of street culture, blending two things that have a place there, skateboarding and selling flowers. Nike were very open to Jeff’s ideas, allowing him complete freedom to create a collaboration he could be proud of that represented what he intended. The swoosh is in the shape of a flower with petals, stitched to create more of a three-dimensional aesthetic, and a leather tongue is utilised to match the rest of the upper, creating a clean finish that results in the shoe feeling more classic and memorable. The insoles feature Chinese calligraphy and on the heel is an embroidered graphic of the flowers, representing when passers-by would hang them on their shirts to smell nicer.
