Daniel Buezo’s latest sneaker collaboration has either been in the making for three years or a whole lifetime, depending on who’s counting.
The collaboration consists of two bold colorways of the Nike Air Max Sunder retro designed in partnership with Kids of Immigrants, the Los Angeles-based apparel brand Buezo co-founded alongside Weleh Dennis in 2016. The collab reworks the Sunder, a Y2K-era runner that Nike is betting big on, dripping it out with subtle fades of deep, syrupy purple and orange. The collaboration’s more recent genesis was at ComplexCon in November 2021.
ComplexCon, Complex’s annual festival centered around sneaker culture, music performances, and brand activations, is a feeding ground for hypebeasts chasing after limited-edition drops. It’s a place where long lines and scuffles form around exclusive products. Rather than sell its own clothes, Kids of Immigrants, which centers themes like community and connectivity in its brand messaging, thought to approach the convention differently in 2021.
Kids of Immigrants shared space in its booth at ComplexCon in 2021 with 13 smaller brands it’s friendly with, like Black Billionaires Club and Yahabibi Market, encouraging them to sell their gear. Kids of Immigrants called it the Support Your Friends program and opted to show rather than tell.
“Our goal was not to sell anything that was Kids of Immigrants,” Buezo says.
It was there, on the floor of the Long Beach Convention Center, that Buezo and the brand came in contact with Nike.
“That moment was when the conversation with Nike started,” he says.
A relationship grew from there. Last year, Kids of Immigrants helped roll out a handful of Nike’s big-bubbled Air Max 1 ‘86 retros. Now, Kids of Immigrants is getting its own sneakers.
A full 36 months after the 2021 ComplexCon, the Kids of Immigrants x Nike Air Max Sunder (priced at $190) will make its debut at the first-ever ComplexCon in Las Vegas, which takes place this weekend. The purple “Sun Down” colorway will be available at a co-branded Kids of Immigrants and Nike space at the convention and sold exclusively through Kids of Immigrants. Following the ComplexCon release of the “Sun Down” colorway, a wider release date for that and the orange “Sun Up” Kids of Immigrants x Nike Air Max Sunder is planned for later this year.
“It’s a full-circle moment because it came from such a pure place,” Buezo says, noting how Kids of Immigrants spent money on the ComplexCon booth back in 2021 without any vision of how the brand might profit from it.
One could trace the circle back even further. Before Buezo, 36, was selling hoodies and tees bearing earnest mantras like “We Are Our Parents Wildest Dreams” and “Together From Local to Global,” he was selling sneakers at mom-and-pop stores in New York and New Jersey as a teenager. His love of footwear, and his aspiration to put his spin on it, goes that far back.
“This is the dream,” Buezo says, “at least for a kid like me from Brooklyn, to have your own Nike.”
The Kids of Immigrants Nikes take the form of an updated Air Max Sunder that looks significantly different from the 1999 original. The overall silhouette of the upper is the same, but that’s about it; here, the shoe wipes out the reflective pods and high mudguard of the standard Sunder. This version features an upper wrapped with wavy, gridded lines that read as symbols—of global connection and diaspora—for the Kids of Immigrants story. Beyond that, the collaboration between Kids of Immigrants and Nike draws a line from Buezo’s childhood dream to his current reality.
Buezo’s Sneaker History
As soon as he could work, the Kids of Immigrants co-founder was working in sneaker stores. First it was Ped Eze in Plainfield, New Jersey, at age 14. After that, it was Bobby’s at the intersection of Knickerbocker and Myrtle avenues in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, where Buezo grew up.
Buezo needed every colorway of every retro, sometimes in doubles just to keep a crispy pair ready. A special shoe like an Air Jordan 8 reissue warranted a triple-up. His employee discount made those kinds of purchases that much easier.
Inevitably, much of the money he earned went right back to those stores when his paycheck hit.
“Literally I’d get paid just to buy shoes,” Buezo says.
He’d buy them early and often. Nike’s release date policies weren’t as strict in the late 2000s, and his bosses were willing to bend the rules. Buezo benefited, making sure he was the first one with certain sneakers.
“I had every Jordan, every Nike, before it came out,” he says.
He wasn’t the only person in his family scooping up Nikes. Buezo has an old photo of his mother, who moved to the US from Honduras, wearing a pair of Air Max 95s. He says the shoes were a necessity for the long hours she spent on her feet while working as a housekeeper. Buezo says his late sister kept Air Maxes in her rotation and got him into the popular Nike running line.
The Nike Air Max Sunder Retro
Up until a couple years ago, the Sunder had remained dormant since its debut. The Sunder was not tremendously popular when it came out in ‘99, especially compared to similar Air Max models from the same era like the Air Max 97 and the Air Max Plus, but it’s maintained a niche following. The training shoe, originally known as the Air Sunder Max (the new pairs are labeled as “Air Max Sunder”), featured a Lycra spandex upper and lugged outsole, retailing for $100 in the mid cut and $95 in the low cut.
The Sunder was not a retro that most collectors were clamoring for. But as Nike seeks to pull back on massively popular (and oversaturated) ’80s retro basketball sneakers, like the Dunk and the Air Force 1, and lean in on Y2K-era runners, the Sunder has a spot in the market. The shoe, with its shrouded upper, covert laces, and ASMR-tickling zipper, strikes the right balance between nostalgic and futuristic.
Nike slow-rolled its return, bringing the Sunder back for the first time in 2022 through Japanese label Comme Des Garçons, a longtime Nike partner that will often take the lead on reintroducing old models.
Kids of Immigrants got a crack at it after the monochromatic CDG pairs, picking the Sunder from a lineup of around five possible models (including the Air Max 95) for its Nike collab in March 2023.
“Because [the Air Max Sunder] was part of something they’d recently done, it was a silhouette that we could pick and actually bring to life in the next 18 to 24 months,” Buezo says.
As Nike prepared to go into the vault and bring back the Sunder, so did Buezo. He researched the shoe by buying up deadstock pairs. By the time the sneakers reached him, there was not much life left in them. In a tragic twist befitting of their name, the old Sunders he acquired promptly crumbled when Buezo tried wearing them.
“I found some pairs on Ebay, ordered them, they broke apart on me,” Buezo says.
Kids of Immigrants’ Air Max Sunder
How did Kids of Immigrants put its Air Max Sunder together?
Buezo wasn’t sure initially if the brand’s story could be translated into footwear. Kids of Immigrants had its first go at that with Vans, on a sneaker collaboration from 2020. But Buezo didn’t know if Nike would understand the Kids of Immigrants mission and be able to translate it.
“I’m not sure how a product can be created off this,” he thought.
The design details in the shoe, along with bonus features in the packaging, help embed the message. (So do the parents of the brand’s co-founders, who will appear in the campaign for the Nike shoes.) The criss-crossing lines on the Kids of Immigrants x Nike Air Max Sunder look like the latitude and longitude lines on a globe, referencing the worldwide journeys the brand celebrates. There’s a space on the inside of the shroud for the wearer to write their name and where they’re from. Each box comes with a mock calling card, just like the ones Buezo would buy for his parents to call home.
“Growing up in New York,” he says, “I would have to go to the corner store and get the right phone card for my mom to call back to Honduras.”
The telecom theme is a clever flip for the Sunder. The original shoe has the numbers 6453, which spell out “Nike” on a touch-tone phone, along the tongue; the Kids of Immigrants pairs switch the numbers up, using the last four digits of the brand’s phone number (323-310-3062) for its community messaging app. The emphasis on communication ties back to Kids of Immigrants, which released a collection called “Remember to Call Home” this year.
There are a handful of other changes unique to the Kids of Immigrants collaboration that separate it from the ‘99 Sunder. There’s the linear upper, which presented a challenge for the developers making the shoe. The Kids of Immigrants x Nike Air Max Sunder has small cutouts on the toe cap. The brand’s name features beneath a translucent outsole on the bottom, and there’s a “K” hit on the heel.
As he worked with Nike on designing the shoe, Buezo let his affinity for the sneakers he grew up on guide him. The small Swoosh placement toward the back of the Kids of Immigrant Sunder is akin to that of the Air Max 95. The TPU cage could have been borrowed from the Air Max 120. The turned-up colors are reminiscent of the flashy shades tucked into Nike’s outdoorsy ACG line.
“That was probably the toughest part of it all,” Buezo says, “the colorways.”
Kids of Immigrants and Nike colored up four takes on the shoe and had to whittle them down to two. (They also sampled pairs that kept the original Sunder Max design, without the redone upper, to use as an option in case their changes rendered the shoe too out there.)
“It was supposed to be one,” Buezo says, “but it was so good, we were like ‘Yo, we need two. We need two.’ It’s hard enough to not do all four.”
The two colorways they landed on, one in sundial orange and the other in Persian violet, mirror each other. There are Air bags in orange and purple with glitter flecked in. For the most part, the colors are transposed across the two pairs.
The gradient that creeps up toward the top of the shoes brings to mind the one used on the Air Max Plus from ‘98. As on the Air Max Plus, the fade is meant to conjure the sky in various states of color—the orange “Sun Up” pair (style code HF3286-700) looks like a glowing morning, the purple “Sun Down” (style code HF3286-500) like a fading evening.
There are deeper meanings for anyone looking. The colors across the two shoes look a bit like those of the Knicks and the Lakers, respectively, representing the coasts that Buezo, who now lives in LA, bounces between. Even the name Sunder, meaning “to split,” plays into double and triple entendres about distance across generations, borders, and time zones. Ultimately though, the Kids of Immigrants Nikes serve to highlight connections rather than differences.
“There was a lot of things that came together,” Buezo says, “from the generational story we’re telling, from our parents to us, and bringing all those worlds together.”
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