Last September, streetwear retailer Kith put on one of New York Fashion Week's biggest runway shows. The show, which was live streamed across the world, was made up of in-house Kith gear in addition to collaborations with Columbia, Nike,
Nike Air Max 90 Dam Adidas, Off-White, and more as well as live performances from the likes of Fabolous and The Lox. Tonight, however, Ronnie Fieg
Nike Air Max 2017 Dames plans to top last year's spectacle with a brand new unveil at the Classic Car Club in Manhattan. The collection is called "Kith Sport" and will feature dozens of collaborations with big name brands, and even a rumored collaboration alongside LeBron James. (Who as we know does look pretty darn good in clothes, not even just for a guy who's twice the size of most men.)Earlier this week, Fieg took to Instagram to reveal the first piece of tonight's offerings—a purple suede take on the Nike Air Maestro 2, a sneaker Scottie Pippen wore in the mid-90s during his quest to win a historic six NBA titles in eight years. Now, ahead of tonight's Kith Sport show, we're bringing you the first look at a different
Nike Air Pegasus 83 Dames Heren version of the Kith x Nike Air Maestro 2, a white leather model that Kith made exclusively for friends and family of the brand.While
Adidas NMD Homme robots are already an established part of the manufacturing process for cars, electronics, and semiconductors, they have been much slower to take over production of sneakers and clothes.One of the main reasons is that robots have a hard time handling the wide variety of soft materials used to make complicated products like a pair of sneakers. A Nike shoe can have as many as 40 different materials in its upper alone, all of which need to be precisely stacked and fused together to make the shoe. This is quite different from a cellphone plant or automotive factory, for example, where the materials involved tend to be rigid and fairly uniform, and robots can pick things up using a vacuum, magnet, or
Nike Air Max 90 Mens Bluemechanical pincher.In garment and shoe manufacturing, no single method has offered an ideal solution. A vacuum may pick up pieces of leather,
Adidas Superstar Herren but it can’t deal with mesh. Mechanical pinchers fumble with pieces that have different degrees of flexibility and stickiness. Magnets, while great for handling metal, are useless when it comes to fabric.A California company called Grabit has a novel technology that’s solving this problem for Nike, and soon perhaps a number of clothes manufacturers as well. Grabit uses electroadhesion—basically the cling of static electricity—to let robots pick up and handle objects of all kinds. The company says the same technology is capable of maneuvering an egg, soft fabric, or a 50 lb. box.The firm has Nike convinced. The sneaker giant acquired a minority stake in it a few years back. Now, as Bloomberg
Adidas ZX 700 Herren reported, Nike is installing about a dozen of its machines in factories, making its shoes in Mexico and China. These Stackit robots, which
Nike Air Max 90 Mens are designed for stacking fabric, can precisely position all the pieces of a sneaker upper in 50 to 75 seconds. A human worker, by contrast, can take well over 10 minutes to do the same job.“We’re just able to pick up multiple pieces at a time and put them down in the right place, based on the vision system and the robot operating system that we’ve designed,” explains Greg Miller, Grabit’s CEO. The human has to pick up and stack each piece individually.Miller says that, in addition to Nike, a number of apparel companies are interested in the technology, particularly shirt makers. Esquel Group, a massive dress-shirt manufacturer that produces for companies including Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger,
Adidas Superstar Femme Rose and Nike, is also an investor. “We’re working with them and a number of others in this space,” Miller says. “We’ve had discussions with Brooks Brothers, those sorts of folks.”The technology is useful for making stiff shirt collars and cuffs, which like the upper of a Nike sneaker, have different layers that need to be stacked and then fused. Grabit plans to introduce robots that can do collars and cuffs next year.To Ronnie, collaborating on the Air Maestro has as much to do with nostalgia as it does with showing appreciation for Pippen himself. To Ronnie, Pippen never got the shine he deserved in his prime, even though, as Ronnie says, "His game has aged like fine wine." And like Jordan and Pippen's dynamic on the court, the Air Maestros were never as popular as Air Jordans. "Me and my crew wanted to be different though, so we
Nike Air Max 90 Herr were big Pippen fans. Everyone had Jordans, and we wore the Uptempos, Maestros and Pippen 1s," he says.But Fieg's love for the Air Maestro—and for Scottie Pippen—goes beyond just collaborating on them. In addition to the sneakers, Fieg says he also directed his first ever commercial for Kith and Nike. The spot will star Scottie Pippen and one of his sons. (The commercial won't be landing on TV, not that Kith's younger, social media-obsessed audience should notice or mind.)
