In a confidential location known only to a select few, an unassuming building hides a sneaker lover’s paradise. This top-secret facility houses the Department of Nike Archives (or DNA), where more than 200,000 rare Nike artifacts are carefully documented and preserved—from never-before-seen sneaker prototypes to the original Nike “swoosh” sketch. This past year, the DNA opened its doors to outside visitors for the first time, allowing a group of curators to comb through its holdings for a new exhibition on Nike’s design history.

The exhibition, called Nike: Form Follows Motion, is set to open at the Vitra Design Museum in Rhein, Germany, on September 21 and continue through May 2025. It’s the first-ever museum exhibition dedicated to Nike, and it tracks the brand from its founding in 1964 to its current status as the world’s largest apparel company. The exhibition’s curator, Glenn Adamson, also co-edited a book on Nike’s design story that will debut on December 3.Nike: Form Follows Motion tells the brand’s overarching story, but its thesis goes deeper than that. The exhibition—and the book of the same name—position Nike as not merely a profit-driven company, but also as a site of cutting-edge sports innovation.

“Having now learned so much about the company, I can say that I’ve never experienced any design thinking that was more intense, multivariable, creative, or complicated than this,” Adamson says.

BEHIND NIKE’S DESIGN THINKING: A TRIP INTO THE TOP-SECRET SNEAKER ARCHIVES

Both the exhibition and the book are divided into four chronological sections: “Track,” which follows Nike’s first years when, Adamson says, jogging was considered a “niche, weird subculture.” “Air,” which unpacks the brand’s explosion into sports advertising through partnerships with athletes like Michael Jordan. “Sensation,” which provides a deep dive into Nike’s sports research programs. And “Relation,” which reflects on Nike’s history of collaboration with external designers.

To condense Nike’s design story into this four-part structure, Adamson’s team started with pinpointing key milestones in the company’s history, like the brand’s often-overlooked early years, when founder Phil Knight was importing shoes from Japan; the release of the first waffle-soled trainer in the early ‘70s; the debut of the iconic Air Force One; the creation of the 1987 Air Max; and the more recent development of the light-weight Flyknit material.

Adamson took several trips to the DNA to acquire background details—and physical objects—that have never been seen before by the public. He says the DNA is unremarkable from the outside, but entering its doors feels like stepping into Nike’s closet, Narnia-style. “It’s all the more magical because of that,” Adamson adds. “It’s like this mass of fascinating objects just waiting to be discovered.”

Inside, Adamson says the rooms he visited were “pragmatic” and intimate. Based on the images taken of the DNA by photographer Alastair Wiper, the space includes a series of moving, fire engine-red shelves stacked from floor to ceiling with shoe boxes, as well as a larger storage facility that looks like a chic warehouse.

The DNA is stocked with thousands of drawings, prototypes, sneakers, and pieces of apparel, as well as a staff of archivists who specialize in fact-checking Nike history. It’s not just a historical repository, either: Adamson says Nike designers and collaborators actively use the DNA’s expansive resources to brainstorm new designs. There, he was able to dig into materials like prototypes and colorways of the Air Force One that were never released, as well as original stock of the first Air Max shoe, whose see-through soles were designed by aeronautical engineer Frank Rudy.

Alongside the original Air Max, plenty of deadstock shoes and prototypes from the DNA will be on view in Nike: Form Follows Motion—though, Adamson says, he was only allowed to take one shoe from each pair, for preservation reasons.

Through his visits to the DNA, Adamson also uncovered pieces of Nike history that he’d never heard of. While looking into Shox, an early aughts series of shock-absorbing sneakers, he uncovered an especially fascinating gem.

“One thing that DNA had was this crazy prototype where they basically created an external shock mount around an existing shoe to see what would happen if you put your foot in it and jumped up and down,” Adamson says. “It was this amazing Frankenstein object. When we saw that, we thought, ‘Oh, we have to include that.’”

INSIDE NIKE’S TRAILBLAZING SPORTS RESEARCH

Adamson’s team also looked into the operations of Nike’s current design labs. While the company has many design teams working internationally, one of its most impressive innovation centers is the Nike Sport Research Lab (NSRL), located in Beaverton, Oregon. The lab is an 85,000-square-foot gym that includes a full-size basketball court, running track, and soccer field, where hundreds of cameras and dozens of force plates track athletes in motion. Its insights can then be turned into cutting-edge applications for new sneakers and apparel.

Nike: Form Follows Motion will dig into the designs that have emerged from the NSRL’s data collection techniques, including the barefoot-mimicking Nike Free shoe, the waste-saving Flyknit material, and the Vapormax running shoe, Nike’s most studied shoe of all time.

“Pretty much anything that you see coming out of Nike now that has technical innovation will have some aspect of that sports research in it,” Adamson says. “I don’t think most people are even aware of this—I certainly wasn’t—and it’s quite revelatory, especially if you get to go there. We’ve devoted a whole gallery of our exhibition to that kind of materials research.”

WHAT’S NEXT IN NIKE’S INNOVATION PLAYBOOK

The new exhibition comes at a pivotal time for Nike. Post-pandemic, the company has been facing supply chain issues and waning consumer interest. Other popular running shoe companies, like Hoka and Brooks, are also putting pressure on Nike to reconnect with its jogging roots. This February, the company began laying off 1,500 employees to trim costs. Amid these tricky headwinds, the company has mainly relied on rereleases of previous gems—like Air Force 1s, Dunks, and Jordans—to maintain interest, rather than debuting new innovations.

That’s not to say there haven’t been any new designs. For its major recent brand moment at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Nike spent seven years using NSRL data to craft its first-ever shoe for breakdancing. It’s also launched an AI platform called Blackbox for brainstorming new shoe designs. In a recent interview with Fast Company, Nike CEO John Donahoe says the company is aiming to recapture its core spirit of innovation with new releases in the next few months: “Just when everyone’s counted Nike out—boom—we do what we’ve done repeatedly over our 50 years, which is something bold, new, disruptive, and we change the game,” Donahoe said.

To understand just how bold and disruptive that history truly is, one need only look to Adamson’s estimation of the company after his year of in-depth research for Nike: Form Follows Motion: “I feel like we’ve done an exhibition about NASA.”