The Air Jordan 3 is an unimpeachable sneaker. It marked the start of a long partnership between the greatest basketball player of all time (if we’re talking footwear, Michael Jordan gets the nod over LeBron James) and the greatest sneaker designer of all time, Tinker Hatfield. The Air Jordan 8 came out in 1988, arriving at a crucial time: Jordan was considering leaving Nike, and the Jordan 3 was part of what convinced him to stay. But why is the Air Jordan 3 so popular? It brought his footwear down to a three-quarter cut, making the silhouette more palatable for everyday wear. It introduced elephant print, the crackled paneling bookending the shoes that went on to become an iconic pattern in Nike and Jordan design. It centered the Jumpman logo, putting Jordan’s silhouette on the tongue. It established Air Jordans as something separate from, and in some cases better than, regular Nike basketball shoes—where the Jordan 1 had siblings like the Nike Dunk and the Jordan 2 was clearly related to the Nike Air Python, the Air Jordan 3 stood on its own.
The popularity of the Jordan 3 has sustained through decades. It was one of the first Air Jordans to ever be retroed when it came back in 1994. It sparked the retro craze for Air Jordans at the turn of the century, and wearing a pair then, when sneaker collecting was still niche, was a signifier that you really cared about footwear. The AJ3 has been released in loads of colorways since its 1988 debut, some iconic and some forgettable. What are the best Air Jordan 3s?
We looked at the whole spectrum of Air Jordan 3 colorways and whittled them down to the 15 best pairs ever released. Note that we’re talking only about pairs that were released here—player exclusives, samples, and those unreleased “We the Best” DJ Khaled collabs do not count. Also consider that we’re giving more weight in these rankings to the Air Jordan 3s that Jordan wore, which just mean more than the retros. What is the most popular Air Jordan 3? That’s more difficult to quantify without hard sales numbers—we’d again point toward one of the original color combos—but this list isn’t totally about that. This is about the most important, the pairs that looked the best then and now, and the ones that people still talk about and covet. These are the best Air Jordan 3 colorways of all time.
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