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Years back, when Nike was just starting to feel around for its Next Big Thing, its designers asked athletes what they really wanted in a performance shoe. The answer, oddly enough, was something like a sock–form-fitting, comfortable, and unobtrusive. That insight led to the development of Flyknit, a totally new shoemaking process where basically everything but the soles and the laces exist as a single piece of fabric, knit by a computer-controlled Grandma (actually a 15-foot, yarn-munching machine). Flyknit shoes are both lighter than older models and vastly less wasteful. Nike's crazy about them. But while Flyknit successfully transformed all those upper parts into a second skin, it didn't do much for soles. Nike Free Hyperfeel looks to complete the job.
>Flyknit is probably the future of Nike.
The Nike Free Hyperfeel is even more sock-like than its predecessor–a distillation of the running shoe to its purist, most simple form. The Air Pegasus–one of Nike's more traditional running shoes–is made up of over 50 different parts; the new Free Hyperfeel consists of just seven. The upper remains a single-piece Flyknit affair, but the bottom is all-new. A super-thin, super-flexible outer sole is dotted with a matrix of tiny squares–"pistons" as Nike calls them–arranged according to common pressure points. The removable inner sole is a thin piece of Lunarlon foam, sliced on the bottom in both directions, allowing it to twist both lengthwise and widthwise. All of this is in the service of keeping you attuned to the surface you're running on, instead of insulated from it.
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In essence, the Free Hyperfeel is a compromise between Nike's proclivities to pad and runners' desires for a more direct sole-on-surface contact. It's an attempt to strip away everything superfluous about the running shoe. (Of course, there is an increasingly large contingent of runners who think that a running shoe is superfluous to begin with.)
But while you might think it would concern Nike to be whittling away their shoes to nothing–you could see the Hyperfeel as a gateway drug to total barefoot running–these and the other Flyknit kicks represent a design coup for the company in a few different ways. They're better for athletes, because they're lighter. They're better for the environment, because they are, on average, roughly 80 percent less wasteful than other running shoes. And they're profitable, because their computer-assisted design makes for a supremely efficient use of materials.
Flyknit is probably the future of Nike. We'll see it on all different types of shoes (c.f. the gorgeous Flyknit Chukkas). But the Free Hyperfeel, which will be available in early September, respond to a unique, more specific challenge: how to give runners the benefits of a running shoe with as little shoe as possible.
