Nike is Cooling Off the Heat Wave Air Bakin Retro Drop in Chilly Varsity Blue

Every year, Nike digs into its archive and pulls out a few retro silhouettes to bring back for the modern market, introducing a new generation of sneakerheads to classics from a bygone era. As we continue to run through the late 90s and early 2000s style revival, the Air Bakin is coming back from 1997 to set the streets on fire all over again.

The Nike Air Bakin Varsity Royal is a blue flame for the newly lit retro, adding to the OG red and yellow release with a two-tone mix of black and blue. The shoe keeps most of the design elements from the OG red colorway, starting with a black strip on the toe that runs around the bottom section of the entire shoe. Above that, a wavy, slitted panel in blue covers the rest of the upper before reverting to black on the top of the tongue. Instead of yellow like the OG pair, the Varsity Royal colorway adds white mesh to the bottom of the tongue and white laces. As with all retro releases of the Bakin, the original AIR text on the heel, which caused controversy for its similarity to the Arabic script for Allah, will be replaced with Nike’s standard “Nike Air” logo.