NIKE presents Air Max Dolce, a new distinctive silhouette that combines Air Max heritage with a contemporary, sculptural approach to everyday design.
Designed to move naturally between sport, streetwear and fashion, Air Max Dolce features a shaped upper with a distinctive cage structure, a laceless construction and a visible Air unit in the heel, which defines its shape and cushioning. The result is a silhouette that feels both familiar and new at once: an everyday sneaker, a casual slip-on style, or a more statement piece that can also be worked into more sophisticated looks. Air Max Dolce is designed to adapt to whoever wears it, rather than imposing a single way of being worn.
The silhouette arrives in two colorways, Light Magenta and Silver, combining iconic Air Max DNA with a contemporary, fashion-driven attitude.
The Air Max DNA
Air Max Dolce is rooted in one of Nike’s most important design stories. In 1987, the Air Max line introduced visible Air cushioning for the first time. What began as a technological innovation tied to cushioning quickly turned into one of the defining elements of Nike’s design language, moving from performance to the track, from the street to becoming a cultural icon.
Air Max Dolce carries this story forward through a silhouette built on that same spirit of innovation, reinterpreted for contemporary everyday use. Its defining elements remain immediately recognizable: the laceless shaped upper, the cage-like overlay structure and the visible Air unit in the heel, which defines the sneaker’s sculptural profile. Designed to be versatile, Dolce moves easily from the most casual moments to more considered styling.
Two expressions, two colorways
Air Max Dolce was initially launched in the Light Magenta colorway, available from August 22, 2026 at a price of 159.99 euros. On September 12, 2026, the silhouette was joined by the Silver version, featuring a metallic finish that gives the model a contemporary, versatile look. Both colorways emphasize Air Max Dolce’s architectural construction, while offering two different interpretations: from the expressive energy of Light Magenta to the more essential, sophisticated attitude of Silver.
Giving voice to a new generation
The launch of Air Max Dolce also put a new generation of creatives at the center. Through the SNKRS app, Nike created a space dedicated to emerging designers and creatives, inviting them to interpret Dolce through their own point of view, their own ideas and their own visual language. The initiative reflects Nike’s commitment to supporting new creative generations, giving them the chance to experiment, create and contribute to the cultural conversation around a new product.
It is in the section dedicated to creatives, however, that the Air Max Dolce project took a broader direction. For the Milan launch, Nike did not simply build a campaign around the new silhouette, but placed the model at the center of an experience weaving together art, sound, fashion and digital culture. On September 12, at the Dropcity space on Via Sammartini 72, Dolce XOXO brought together eleven names among artists, designers, filmmakers and creative studios, in a day dedicated to the exhibition, followed by a musical program running until late at night.
The common thread is a generation that grew up with the visual culture of the early 2000s: the internet as a place to inhabit, customize and continuously rewrite. Glitter, avatars, saved images, personalized profiles and the early languages of social media thus become not just nostalgic references, but materials to build on. The idea behind Dolce XOXO is precisely to turn this digital imagery into something physical and shared.
Among those involved was Sara Sadik, a French artist who works across video, performance and installation. Her practice often builds narrative environments suspended between fiction, pop culture and science fiction, also using video games and the languages of the internet to talk about identity, adolescence, belonging and transformation. She is a particularly fitting presence for the project because her work starts precisely from the possibility of building new worlds through images and codes belonging to contemporary culture.
Alongside her, Tudor Ciurescu brought a practice spanning image, object, photography, print and sculpture. Born in Romania and now active between Lausanne and Milan, the artist works on the relationship between visual culture, memory and contemporary imagery, often putting analog and digital references into dialogue.
Another interesting presence was Forniture Pallotta, an artistic project founded by Alessandra Pallotta that uses food as creative material. The collective works across food design, installation, performance and set design, turning edible elements into genuine visual and narrative constructions. An approach that further expands Dolce XOXO‘s vocabulary: the sneaker is no longer seen only as a design object, but as a starting point for a series of interpretations involving different languages.
The exhibition was completed by Mika Ben Amar, Common Index, Due000 Contemporary Archive, Hollywood Superstar Review, Emir Karyo, Luna Mahoux, Rat Section and Brennan Wojtyla, bringing different practices and sensibilities together within the same space. The day, however, did not end with the exhibition. From 11pm to 3am, Dolce XOXO shifted gears and the exhibition space turned into a club, with Renoiterrible, Rat Section and Spiritual Sauna at the center of the musical lineup. The logic stayed the same: take a culture born online and bring it back into the physical world, turning shared references into a collective experience.
Air Max Dolce is almost the pretext through which Nike builds a broader discourse on the way design, fashion, art and the internet influence one another today. The sneaker remains at the center, but stops being the endpoint and becomes an object around which a new generation of creatives can build images, atmospheres and languages.
