Nike Dresses The Air Force 1 Low As One Of New York’s Least Glamorous Locals

A new Air Force 1 Low colorway skips New York’s usual pigeon and skyline references and goes straight for the subway system’s least-loved resident: the rat.

The Nike Air Force 1 Low has taken on New York City by way of skylines, subway lines, and neighborhood pride more times than anyone could count, but its newest black-based colorway skips the postcard version of the city entirely. The upper is built from black tumbled leather, kept plain enough to let the shoe’s real gimmick sit near the heel: a patch of dense fur meant to read as a rat’s coat, wrapping around the counter with a hidden red eye graphic tucked into the texture, the kind of detail that only shows up once someone actually looks. A muted, translucent pinkish-red outsole runs underneath, deliberately mismatched against the black upper, with brownish “AIR” branding running along the midsole and metallic dubraes finishing the laces.

It reads less like a design flourish and more like a specific character study. New York’s Air Force 1 tributes have leaned on pigeons, yellow cabs, and borough pride for decades, but rats carry a very different kind of local authenticity, the subway-platform, MetroCard-swiping kind rather than the skyline-postcard kind. Bold “NYC” branding sits on the tongue in case the reference wasn’t already clear enough, and the choice to hide the eye graphic inside the fur rather than displaying it openly on the upper suggests Nike wanted the joke to reward a closer look rather than announce itself from across a room, the same way an actual subway rat tends to stay half-hidden until someone’s standing right on top of the platform edge.

 Nike Air Force 1 Low sneaker featuring a dark tumbled leather upper, fuzzy brown faux-fur accents on the Swoosh and heel, and a translucent pinkish-red outsole.

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This colorway isn’t traveling alone. Independent reporting on the release describes it as one half of a two-shoe rat-and-subway themed Air Force 1 pack, paired with a second colorway built around New York’s MTA MetroCard system rather than the animal itself, suggesting Nike is treating the whole concept as a small thematic collection rather than a one-off release. A separate, lighter grey-and-pink Air Force 1 ’01 covering similar subway-tunnel-and-rat territory has also surfaced in coverage of the same general period, built in soft grey suede against a light pink accent rather than this pairing’s black leather and darker fur, and carrying its own MetroCard-style detailing, raising the possibility that the pack could end up spanning more than two pairs once everything is accounted for, though which specific shoes belong to which named release hasn’t been made entirely clear yet.

The whole concept is currently pointed at a Fall 2026 window, expected to land through Nike’s own SNKRS channel and select Nike Sportswear retailers domestic, alongside international rollout through outlets like the one behind this piece’s own sourc. Pricing on this specific black colorway has been reported as still to be announced, though the grey subway-themed companion piece has been reported with a $150 price tag, giving at least a rough sense of where the pack is likely to land even without a confirmed number for this pairing specifically.

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None of this happens in a vacuum. The Air Force 1 itself dates back to 1982, designed by Bruce Kilgore as the first basketball shoe built around Nike Air cushioning, and it picked up the nickname “Uptown” in New York not long after, cementing a relationship between the shoe and the city that’s now stretched past four decades. Nike has mined that relationship constantly, from borough-specific packs referencing individual New York neighborhoods to special editions marking the Knicks’ championship runs, and the silhouette is closing in on its 45th anniversary in 2027, which tends to mean even more archive-digging and reinterpretation in the years surrounding it rather than less.

Rodents specifically aren’t new territory for the model either. A 2020 Air Force 1 tied to the Lunar New Year already used a Year of the Rat theme, in a considerably brighter White/Multi-Color pairing built for celebration rather than grit. This new colorway reads as a much more literal, streetwise cousin of that earlier release, closer in spirit to the kind of NYC-street-animal sneaker moment Staple’s Pigeon Dunk created two decades ago, when a Nike Dunk Pro SB dressed as one of the city’s other unglamorous mainstays caused lines and reported scuffles outside a single Lower East Side shop, than to a festival colorway. Whether this new pack reaches anything close to that level of cultural moment remains to be seen, but the impulse behind it, taking an animal New Yorkers actively dislike and turning it into something desirable, is clearly cut from the same cloth.

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For all the design detail available, several basics remain open. A Japan market release notice describing this exact black, fur-heeled, pink-outsoled pairing lists no price, no style number, and no confirmed domestic release date, only a general 2026 release window. Independent English-language coverage of a closely matching black colorway from the same rat-themed pack lines up with nearly every design detail in that notice, strongly suggesting they describe the same shoe, but that coverage also lists pricing as still to be announced and gives only a general Fall 2026 timeframe rather than a specific date. Until Nike’s own storefronts list the release directly, the exact SKU, price, and release date should be treated as unconfirmed rather than assumed, and the full scope of the wider pack, whether it stops at two colorways or eventually grows to include the grey subway-tunnel variant reported elsewhere, is similarly still an open question rather than a settled fact.