The story starts with a defunct airline and ends with a sneaker that demonstrates what happens when cultural authority drives corporate partnerships.
Air Afrique ceased operations in 2002, but its ghost has been haunting the fashion world lately. Not in a melancholy way — more like the kind of haunting that demands attention. When four young creatives decided to resurrect the airline’s name as a cultural collective in 2021, they weren’t just being nostalgic. They were making a point about African archives and who gets to tell those stories.
Now they’ve convinced Nike to make that point with them, and the result is the Air Max RK61, a shoe that arrives October 9 carrying serious cultural weight.
Founded in 1961 by eleven newly independent West and Central African states, Air Afrique connected more than cities. “Beyond being an airline, Air Afrique was a meeting place — families formed on those flights,” says Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, one of the collective’s four founders and editor of Air Afrique Magazine. “And it was a patron of the arts, from cinema to literature.”
That’s not romantic revisionism. The airline really did sponsor cultural events, fund films, and create the kind of Pan-African network that politicians talked about but rarely built. When it folded after decades of financial struggles, something essential was lost.
Thiam and his collaborators — Lamine Diaoune, Djiby Kebe, and Jeremy Konko — have spent the last few years trying to recover that something through exhibitions, publications, and now product design. Their approach is methodical: they’re not just celebrating the past but using it to build new cultural infrastructure.
The Air Max RK61 gets its name from the airline’s two-letter flight code and founding year. But the design philosophy goes deeper than clever references. The shoe merges moccasin elegance with Nike’s Air cushioning technology, a combination that sounds simple until you consider what it means.
“When you returned home, you dressed in your finest,” Thiam explains. “That tradition of elegance was our starting point — but it had to merge with the comfort of sneakers.”
The breakthrough came during a meeting when Nike footwear designer Jupiter Desphy showed up wearing moccasins with sneaker insoles. That improvised hybrid became the template: formal enough for the kind of people who understand that presentation matters, comfortable enough for a generation that refuses to suffer for style.
That improvisation set the tone: every element of the RK61 is part style, part story. “Air Afrique” appears in morse code on the outsole. The zipper pull features the original airline logo. The sock liner mimics vintage aircraft seats. But these aren’t gimmicks — they’re breadcrumbs for people who know the reference.
The two colorways tell their own story. Classic black for formal occasions, off-white as a nod to dandysme — a tradition of sharp, expressive dress reimagined through movements like Congolese La Sape and contemporary African tailoring. Both versions will likely sell out, but that’s almost beside the point.
The campaign, titled Première Classe, plays with language in the way good art always does. First class in aviation terms, but also “a class of excellence” — a curatorial concept that shaped how they cast the imagery.
Didier Drogba appears alongside renowned actor Issa. Malian music legend Oumou Sangaré shares frames with younger voices. The most powerful presence might be Mme Daba Traoré, a former Air Afrique flight attendant who embodies the project’s living archive. Sprinter Marie-Josée Ta Lou-Smith rounds out the group, representing not just athletic achievement but Côte d’Ivoire, where Air Afrique was headquartered.
“Première Classe means both first class in aviation and a class of Afro-diasporic excellence — the best of us across generations,” the collective explains. It’s aspirational without being exclusive, which is a difficult balance to strike.
This collaboration didn’t happen overnight. The collective’s relationship with Nike began through Virgil Abloh’s Air exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, then developed through their Air Afrique Football Club campaign. Each project built trust.
“We don’t collaborate with many people,” Thiam says. “We protect our name, and only work with those who share our intention. That’s why Nike makes sense for us.”
For Nike, the partnership represents something more strategic than seasonal product drops. The company has been thinking seriously about cultural responsibility, and Air Afrique offers a model for how heritage can be honored rather than appropriated.
The RK61 won’t change the sneaker industry, but it might change how we think about what products can carry. “Air is both literal and symbolic,” the collective notes. “Air Afrique took to the skies to connect cultures and newly independent African peoples. Air also symbolizes elevation — through culture and humanity.”
That’s not marketing speak. It’s a theory of design that treats objects as cultural vessels, capable of carrying history forward rather than just satisfying consumer desire. Whether that theory translates into sales remains to be seen, but the conversation has already started.
The Air Max RK61 launches October 9 on SNKRS and at select retailers. But its real test won’t be in sales figures — it’ll be in whether other brands follow this model of collaboration, where cultural authority shapes corporate strategy rather than the other way around.
