Nike’s Air Max 95 Trades Its Waves for a Grey and Green Bubble Update

A 2026-dated Big Bubble Tech colorway pairs iron grey uppers with a green accent that two retailers can’t quite agree on naming.

Style code IH7853-004 belongs to a colorway that two separate retailers currently describe two different ways. A Japan market rel notice lists it as “Iron Grey/Dream Green.” UK stockist Captain Creps has the same SKU up as “Iron Grey/Black,” with Illusion Green named as a supporting tincture in the palette alongside Metallic Silver. Same shoe, same number on the box, two names. That’s not unusual for a Nike rel still working its way toward a firm date, but it’s worth being upfront about before getting into what the shoe actually looks like.

Nike Air Max 95 Black And Green

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The Air Max 95 has been in Nike’s rotation since 1995, and it has absorbed plenty of reworks over three decades without losing the shape that made it a staple: the layered upper, the rib cage midsole panels, the visible Air unit at the heel. The Air Max Big Bubble line, which this colorway belongs to, is a different kind of update. It keeps the 95’s proportions but swaps out the parts that made the original recognizable up close.

On IH7853-004 specifically, that means “sleek no-sew synthetic panels” standing in for the mesh base layer, combined with mixed materials across the upper for texture, according to Captain Creps’ listing. The visible Air cushioning stays, scaled up, which is where the line’s name comes from.

The original 95 was designed by Sergio Lozano, who built the shoe’s layered panels and rib-like midsole around human anatomy, treating the upper as muscle and the sole unit as bone and cartilage. That anatomical logic is exactly what a design built from smooth synthetic panels and lightweight attachments has to work against. Where the original relied on visible stitching and layered mesh to sell the idea of a body underneath the shoe, Big Bubble Tech gets there with fewer, smoother pieces and a larger Air unit doing more of the visual work.

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Across the Big Bubble Tech rel that have already landed, the same design logic repeats. On the Black/Wolf Grey-Smoke Grey-Metallic Silver pair (IH7853-001), Nike removed the 95’s iconic wavy side panels entirely and replaced them with thin, raised, see-through TPU strips, paired with textured leather on the toe and steel blue armored mesh on the panels, a combination SoleRetriever described as a gorpcore take on the silhouette. On Medium Ash/Steam (IH7853-200), the waves survive but as “lighter pieces that sit more like attachments than layers” rather than structural panels, per Sneaker Freaker‘s coverage, with semi-translucent side overlays and a sculpted mudguard running toe to heel.

That’s the throughline for the line as a whole: reduce weight, simplify the layering, and let the enlarged Air unit carry more of the shoe’s visual identity than the side panels used to. Sneaker Freaker called the approach a “heretical” departure from how the 95 usually gets reissued, and traced the influence back to Nike’s Ultra era of stripped-down, lighter Air Max builds.

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IH7853-004 is the third confirmed colorway in the Big Bubble Tech rollout, following Black/Wolf Grey-Smoke Grey-Metallic Silver in summer 2026 and Medium Ash/Steam on May 6, 2026. Both of those released at $200 in the US, through Nike.com and select retailers. Where the earlier pairs lean into grey-on-grey with cooler blue or steel accents, this one is the first in the line confirmed to carry a green hit as a primary or secondary tint, whichever name ends up sticking.

Nike has treated Big Bubble Tech as an ongoing platform rather than a single drop, with a Sneaker Freaker report noting more colorways were expected to follow the first release, so a grey and green pairing landing third in the sequence tracks with a brand steadily working through a broader palette rather than front-loading its boldest option.

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Captain Creps lists IH7853-004 at £174.99 with a release date of June 23, 2026. Neither figure has been independently confirmed by a second retailer as of this writing, and no US price or date has been published anywhere in the sourcing for this piece, though the pattern set by the first two Big Bubble Tech colorways points toward a likely $200 US retail if that holds. The Japan market listing that surfaced the “Iron Grey/Dream Green” name gives only a year, 2026, without a specific date.

None of that is unusual this early in a release cycle, but it’s enough that the responsible read is: confirmed shoe, confirmed style code, unconfirmed date, unconfirmed price outside the UK, and a colorway name that depends on which market’s retailer you ask. The shoe itself, judging by the rest of the Big Bubble Tech line it belongs to, is a fairly clean bet regardless of what the tag ends up saying.