Bauhaus-Inspired Nike Air Max 270 Sneakers Inspired Toilet Paper Magazine Posters

Nike’s first lifestyle Air Max marries the softest, smoothest and resilient foam, Nike React before landing on design studio inspo boards paying tribute to art movements over the last 100+ years. First up is the Air Max 270 React paying tribute to the Bauhaus, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.

It’s a notable release on its own because it’s actually the first time Nike has combined its energy-returning React foam with its 270-degree Nike Air bubble on the heel.

The sneaker also mixes the deep blue, bright red, electric yellow, and turquoise many, including Adobe, identify as a shorthand to the Bauhaus color palette, writes Fast Company.

Toilet Paper Magazine picks up the relay baton with this series of Nike Air Max 270 React posters inspired by the Bauhaus German art school operational from 1919 to 1933.

The Bauhaus was founded by Weimar-based architect Walter Gropius, who combined both arts and crafts and the fine arts worlds in a democratic, populist intellectualism. The Art Story describes the Bauhaus movement in terms that resonate today:

The origins of the Bauhaus lie in the late 19th century, in anxieties about the soullessness of modern manufacturing, and fears about art's loss of social relevance. The Bauhaus aimed to reunite fine art and functional design, creating practical objects with the soul of artworks.

Unlike truly anti-intellectual movements, the Bauhaus decried art world snobbery but sought to elevate more practical crafts of architecture and interior design, textile and woodwork, for example, placing them on a “par with fine arts such as sculpture and painting.”

Bauhaus as an educational institution migrated among 3 German cities—Weimar (1919 to 1925), Dessau (1925 to 1932), and Berlin (1932 to 1933)—until it was closed due to mounting pressures from the Nazis that it was a center of communist intellectualism.

A key tenet of the Bauhaus movement is embodied in Nike’s Air Max 270 React. Most famously, these design principles of beauty and functionality both launched today Apple/Mac grand.

The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus were under development in Germany before the Bauhaus was born. For the artist and creator also, the Bauhaus scoffed at the lack of utility in ‘high art’ concepts, arguing instead that one’s individual artistic spirit was reconcilable with mass production and the added benefits of utility and affordability

Target understands this design mantra very well in a way that Walmart does not. The principle is embedded in Target’s DNA and Target suffers with consumers, when they stray too far into ordinariness. Walmart tends to screw up when they play Target’s design game.

Returning to Nike and the entire world of street art and design, the idea is very much about creating a design aesthetic in functional items like sneakers.

Checking for Nike’s sustainability cred for its Air Max lineup, we note that the Air Max 270 uses more than 70% recycled manufacturing waste, according to Wear Testers.