Like many children growing up in the ’90s, Charlese Antoinette Jones remembers flipping through Eastbay catalogs in school and obsessing over the newest sneaker designs with her friends. Seeing the OG gold colorway of the Nike Air Max 97 for the first time sticks in her memory. She worked at Kids Foot Locker and Champs Sports in high school for the employee discount. She can rifle off information about the first 11 Air Jordans with ease; “Space Jam” 11s are her favorite pair. And a look through her Instagram page will show you that Nike and Air Jordan sneakers are still laced on her feet often.
So it should come as no surprise that when Jones was hired to be the lead costume designer for Air, a film that tells the story about how Nike courted Michael Jordan back in the ’80s to sign a sneaker endorsement deal that changed the industry forever, she was excited.
“God,” says Jones with a laugh when asked what led to her landing the role. She goes on to say how Air director and star Ben Affleck was impressed by her work on Judas and the Black Messiah, and one of the film’s producers had initially connected them both. Jones has been a costume designer since 2012 and also worked on films like the 2022 Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. For Air, she was tasked with taking Nike and its employees back to the ’80s.
One might assume that a film about one of the biggest moments in Nike’s history would grant Jones access to its archives in Beaverton, Oregon. But Nike actually had no involvement in Air whatsoever. That meant Jones had to get creative to represent Nike decades before it was a multi-billion dollar corporation. She scoured the internet and sourced items from a vintage dealer’s warehouse (she would not disclose whom). If she couldn’t find something, she recreated it. To nod to the Dapper Dan high school basketball tournament that one of the film’s main characters Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) co-founded in 1965, she had the logo recreated and printed onto one of the many schleppy polos he wears throughout the film. Phil Knight (Affleck) goes on a run in a purple spandex number that Jones based off of old footage of the Nike CEO going on a run that perfectly matches his grape Porsche 911.
The most notable Nike item seen in Air is worn by Affleck on the movie poster and isn’t even from the ’80s. It’s a blue and red Nike flight jacket from 1992. It was initially supposed to be a reference piece to help the costume department properly recreate a vintage Nike windbreaker. It looked so good that it made it into the film.
“I didn’t want to use that jacket originally because it wasn’t accurate. But because he was using it in the end credits, it made sense,” says Jones. “Also, creatively, you don’t want to stifle things just because it’s not accurate. We have this amazing look that’s on this amazing poster.”
But Jones wasn’t just sourcing and remaking Nike running gear. Throughout Air, we’re also given a look at what the typical American might have been wearing to the corporate office job in the ’80s. Jones says she relied on old issues of GQ and Esquire to nail the more specific details and sourced a lot of vintage Armani. Her team stumbled upon retro 7-Eleven polos that workers would have worn in the ’80s on eBay, under the radar gems from the film’s wardrobe. When it came to dressing Jordan’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis), Jones not only referenced photos but also memories of her own family members to dress Deloris for more intimate scenes at her home in North Carolina.
“I based her look off of my knowledge as a Black woman having aunts and a grandmother who are in that age range,” says Jones. “My family’s from North Carolina, so when I would visit, that’s what my aunt would be wearing at my great-grandparents’ house.”
For more on Jones’ work on Air, check out our full interview below.