After Tinker: Wilson Smith III and the Design Story of the Air Jordan XVI

Every Air Jordan from the III onward had been Tinker Hatfield’s. For over a decade, the line’s identity — the elephant print, the ballistic mesh, the patent leather, the carbon fiber — flowed from one designer’s sketchbook, developed in famous collaboration with Michael Jordan himself. So when the Air Jordan XVI arrived in 2001 carrying someone else’s name, it wasn’t just a new shoe. It was the first test of whether an Air Jordan could be great without Tinker.

The designer who inherited that test was Wilson Smith III.

An impossible act to follow

It’s worth pausing on how unenviable the assignment was. Hatfield’s run from the Air Jordan III through the XV spans most of the shoes people mean when they say “grail.” Following it was the sneaker-design equivalent of taking the stage after the headliner — except the headliner hadn’t left the building, and the audience was the most opinionated fanbase in footwear.

Smith was no outsider, though. A longtime Nike designer with years of experience across the company’s categories, he came to the Jordan line as a respected veteran rather than a newcomer — someone who had worked in the same building, and the same design culture, that produced the shoes he was now succeeding. What he delivered was not an imitation of Hatfield’s language but a genuine argument of his own.

The idea: a shoe that changes clothes

The XVI’s central concept was convertibility. A gaiter-style cover — the shroud — snapped over the entire lacing area, transforming a breathable, mesh-paneled basketball shoe into something sleek and almost formal. One shoe, two identities: uncover it for the court, cover it for the boardroom.

That duality wasn’t arbitrary. In 2001, Michael Jordan was the boardroom — retired from playing (for the moment), working as an executive with the Washington Wizards, photographed in tailored suits more often than warmups. A design that could move between performance and polish was, quite literally, a portrait of its namesake at that point in his life. Sneaker gimmicks usually exist to look novel on a shelf. The shroud existed to say something, which is why people still argue about it a quarter-century later. (We’ve reviewed how the shroud holds up in actual daily wear separately — spoiler: the concept is stronger than the mechanism.)

Continuity in the details

For all its newness, the XVI is studded with respectful callbacks. The patent leather mudguard wrapping the toe is an unmistakable nod to the Air Jordan XI, Hatfield’s most beloved design — glossy, formal, and instantly familiar to anyone who’d worshipped the XI five years earlier. The emphasis on a clean, dressed-up silhouette echoed the XI’s tuxedo-with-shorts legend. And under the surface, the shoe was thoroughly of its performance moment: a hidden quick-lace system beneath the shroud, an inner-sleeve fit, visible Air cushioning in the heel, and a lightweight Phylon midsole.

Four colorways released in 2001 at $160 retail: the black/varsity red pair in the line’s most traditional palette, a white/midnight navy pair, the light ginger colorway that would become the XVI’s most famous thanks to events later that year, and a whisper/cherrywood pair in more subdued tones. Notably, the palette leaned mature — deep reds, navy, spice tones — consistent with a shoe designed to pass in grown-up rooms.

The reception: honest mixed reviews, then and now

Let’s not sand off the truth: the XVI divided people on arrival, and it divides them still. Admirers saw an elegant, ambitious design with a real concept. Critics saw a shoe hiding its best self under a cover — and plenty of wearers, including professional players of the era, simply removed the shroud and played in the cleaner shoe underneath. The fact that the XVI arguably looks better undressed became the standard knock on it: what does it say about a signature feature that the shoe improves without it?

Two things can be true. The shroud’s execution had real flaws — a detachable part that could come loose was always going to frustrate athletes. And the design was braver than most of what the sneaker industry produced that year. The XVI attempted something no Air Jordan had tried before, in the shadow of the hardest act in footwear, during the strangest chapter of Jordan’s career. Ambition with flaws beats safety with none; that’s our honest read, and it’s why we give the shoe a warmer verdict than its reputation suggests.

The XVI’s place in the story

The XVI’s timing gave it a second historical role it never asked for. Released in 2001 with its namesake in a front office, it became — within months — the shoe on Michael Jordan’s feet as he launched his Washington Wizards comeback, a chapter we cover fully in the XVI and the Wizards era. The convertible design conceived for an executive Jordan ended up back on an NBA floor under a playing one. There’s something fitting in that: a shoe built around transformation, caught mid-transformation itself.

Wilson Smith III’s XVI didn’t settle the question of whether the Jordan line could thrive after Tinker — the models that followed would keep asking it. But it answered a harder one: whether a post-Hatfield Jordan could have a genuine idea of its own. It could. It did. It just kept the idea under a cover, and trusted us to look.

Sixteen is an independent editorial site. We are not affiliated with Nike, Inc. or Jordan Brand.