Nike’s concept Air Jordan 3 RTNA puts butterfly tech on your feet

One man has spent thirty years trying to replicate the high-impact hues in nature. Now his technique is ready for art, accessories and concept Air Jordans

The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art is just about the last place you’d expect to see a pair of concept Air Jordans. And yet there they are in a glass case, where they’ll sit all summer, just down Camellia Walk and not far from the Rose Garden and Waterlily House in Kew Gardens. 

The Nike Air Jordan 3 RTNA – ‘retna’/retina – is getting a very early preview by its usual standards. The concept shoe, for which Nike has no current timeline for any release, is the result of a years-long partnership between its Explore Team and zoologist Andrew Parker’s company Lifescaped. Tinker Hatfield, the man behind the original Air Jordan 3 and now serving as VP of Design and Special Projects, was heavily involved with Kim Kovel, Elizabeth Brock Jones and Tory Bryant overseeing the project over the course of two years, from design and materials to building the prototypes. 

So what’s so special about these shoes? Nike is referring to the RTNA coating, that has been used in different 'zones' across the whole Air Jordan 3, as a step towards “the future of colour”. The coating is applied to the surface of the shoe, without mixing it with any other materials and then cut and sewn to the pattern. It’s most striking on the iridescent blue, lilac and lime green tongue - the coating didn't stick to the Jumpman logo - and heel tab with the classic elephant print on the upper. But this isn’t your everyday 2015 Nike Air Max Ultra iridescence. 

Nike’s RTNA coating uses Lifescaped’s Pure Structural Colour technique. Based on the process found in nature on everything from grasses to marine worms, it’s an incredibly thin, transparent silicon dioxide coating made up of microscopic structures, which Parker compares to tiny prisms or holograms. These can be designed and sculpted to selectively reflect only certain wavelengths of light, and thus produce specific colours to the eye of the viewer – no pigments or dyes whatsoever. “It’s the minute structures at a microscopic level which interact with light rays to produce an incredibly bright colour,” says Parker, who has been studying, and trying to recreate, the phenomenon since 1990. 

Concept Nike Air Force 1 on display at Kew Gardens WIRED

The Air Jordan 3 RTNA is part of the Naturally Brilliant Colour exhibition on Lifescaped’s experiments with bringing structural colour to real products, which runs from this week until September 26 at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, outside London. We saw an earlier model, with a slightly different colour treatment and even more of a Back to the Future aesthetic, of the Air Jordan 3 RTNA as well as a pair of concept black Air Force 1s with a striking blue-purple RTNA upper from behind a glass case in the gallery. 

Kew Gardens volunteers have been instructed not to touch the shoes and a Nike spokesperson told us they’re keen not to have people’s oily fingers on them at this early stage: “There’s a certain level of white glove treatment that comes with these innovations, the same way some Nike artefacts from back in the day would be handled.”

The coating itself is less than 1/100,000th of a hair thick and can be applied uniformly over any material. As part of its sustainability push, developers on the Explore Team are also investigating ways that RTNA could be applied to “refresh and recolour” reclaimed stranded materials in its shoes - the underlying colour of the material can be used as a component to create new hues. The Air Jordan 3 appears to be using Nike Grind, its gritty, upcycled manufacturing scrap on the outsole, too. 

Back to the Shirley Sherwood Gallery and Kew is displaying the Nike concept shoes, Pure Structural Colour samples and prototypes, together with artworks from its collection, against black backgrounds, with spotlights to best show off the bright, vivid tones. One question that remains is how the colour technique performs in sunlight and regular indoor lighting, but in person, up close, in this setting, the large wall-mounted discs of Pure Structural Colour in particular are quite literally dazzling to look at. 

Concept Nike Air Jordan 3 on display at Kew GardensWIRED

Lifescaped is even billing this as ‘the world’s brightest colour’, or more accurately, type of colour, having so far conducted its own spectrometry and visual comparison tests with the University of Oxford. Industrial designer Marc Newson is a fan, referring to Pure Structural Colour as “the most vivid colour I have seen” and comparing the results to the “jewel-like shades” found in nature. 

On show are a range of base materials, including silicone rubber, canvas, acrylic and glass, which have been coloured partly or, in many cases, entirely by this coating of transparent microstructures – no pigments in sight. “It will never fade and it can be made in any hue,” says Parker. 

By most accounts, Neotropical morpho butterflies would be in the running for the brightest colour in nature for their intense blue, green and purple wings. But what you see on a morpho’s wings isn’t a pigment: instead, it’s structural colour, which occurs when completely transparent patterned structures on the wings are able to separate, channel and reflect specific wavelengths of light. When we see a blue morpho, then, because of the precise design and hundreds of nanometers-wide distances, we are seeing only the blue wavelengths reflected back. 

Various species have evolved this light manipulation for mating, camouflage and communication, and produce the effect via different mechanisms, with distances of hundreds of nanometers (490nm for cyan, 585nm for yellow) between film boundaries or crystal blocks determining the exact hues reflected back into our eyes and displayed as colour. 

Scientists around the world have experimented with recreating the technique artificially, including Toyota's research labs in Tokyo and Harvard University’s Manoharan Lab, School of Engineering and Applied Physics. For seven years, Andrew Parker ran a biomimetics group at the University of Oxford (where he is now a visiting senior research fellow), studying structural colour in not just butterflies but metallic beetles, ammonite fossils and opal. Inspired by a 2006 visit from Prince Charles – who suggested that Parker work to turn his discoveries into products – Parker formed his company, Lifescaped, in 2014.

The coating that produces the effect is made up of silicon dioxide, the same material found in diatom single-cell algae, radiolaria, sponge spikes and many plant cells. It’s deposited into a layer around one micron (1/1000th of a millimeter) thick using industrial thin-film machines, which have been modified by the Lifescaped team. 

The silicon dioxide forms a light-reflecting architecture at a micro scale, the precise design of which Lifescaped doesn’t want to disclose: its commercial partners – including Nike, no doubt – want to keep the process a secret. 

The team is no longer trying to faithfully copy a single plant or animal species like the morpho butterfly, though. This process, which Lifescaped was attempting until 2016, needed expensive, controlled clean rooms and the team was able to make a colour-producing material only around 2-4cm in size. That’s compared to the 50cm Pure Structural Colour discs which Lifescaped recently placed in the forests of Shropshire as an art installation. 

“When you copy the principle behind all those examples in nature, you’re not trying to copy a structure anymore,” says Parker. “We managed to reproduce the principle in a fairly cheap manner.” While still more expensive than paint, and thus more likely to appeal to luxury-minded industries, the technique can now be used to manufacture at volume. 

According to Lifescaped, the current process achieves 100 per cent reflection over a wide range of angles: the colour looks constant as you move around the object, unlike say a hummingbird’s iridescent feathers, which alter depending on the perspective. “We get a whole range of angles of the same wavelengths, or very similar wavelengths,” he says. Some Lifescaped objects, such as the discs, do appear to change colour when, say, viewed from across the room.

Coral G. Guest’s Pollia work, on show in the exhibition, uses flakes of Pure Structural Colour mixed with other paints and pigments to illustrate tiny, 4mm Pollia berries which have one of the most intense blues found in nature. In an accompanying video, the artist says that when she first saw the dry, raw flakes in tiny pots they seemed a bit of a “non-event at first” but that when she applied them to the ‘vehicle’, in this case polymer, she was convinced. Lifescaped refers to Guest’s painting as a “scientifically accurate method of reproduction”. 

With accessory prototypes – including a natty pair of sunglasses and crystals in pieces of jewellery designed by Alexandra Tosto – also featured, and the Nike RTNA partnership out in the wild, Lifescaped is open for business. “This colour is ready for any company,” says Parker. The pandemic put on hold an extended project to produce it in the form of a paint, rather than a coating, for use in the automotive industry: “Cars are going to take a little longer. To make it into a paint, there’s one or two more steps, but we have made really good strides.”

Pure aesthetics aside, why go to all the trouble? Because some hues, in particular pigments in shades of yellow, are still mined unethically, and Pure Structural Colour could prove to be a more ethical and sustainable alternative. There’s other advantages, too, says Parker: “If we were to put it on a jumbo jet, it would weigh about one tonne less than if paint was used.” 

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK