The Future Back to the Future Owed Us
October 21, 2015 is the day Marty McFly arrives in the future. No flying cars, no hoverboards, and—most painfully—no self-lacing shoes. We made it to that date and the best we had to offer was a commemorative sneaker with the correct color scheme and no Power Laces.
To be fair, the Nike SB Dunk Low Premium "Marty McFly" does look right. The palette is correct, the design nods to the Air Mag without pretending to be it, and it’s an actual shoe you can wear rather than a prop you can only display. The real Air Mag has appeared in limited charity auction runs over the years—a collector artifact that costs as much as a car and mostly lives in a glass case. That’s not footwear. That’s a reliquary.
I’ve thought too long about why Back to the Future Part II’s version of the future felt so specifically right as a kid. Part of it is that the design work was genuinely good—the shoes, the jacket, the hoverboard all share a coherent aesthetic logic that still holds up. The future they built had texture and color and internal rules. It was specific in the way that the futures we actually got mostly aren’t. Ours are grey and app-shaped and frictionless in a way that feels like nothing.
Ninety-five euros for a shoe that gets the color right. Close enough, I suppose.