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After The Last Dance took over our screens in the spring, Air Jordan resale prices skyrocketed. Those rising prices served as proof that in today’s influencer-driven sneaker economy, there’s still nothing that can make a shoe a must-have like putting it on the coolest people on the planet and making sure everyone sees it. Case in point: Even decades after its original TV run, there are still few sneaker texts as formative or influential as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
The show, which ran for six seasons from 1990 to 1996, recently made something of a generational resurgence, with HBO Max treating the series as a flagship offering on its launch at the end of May. The full run being readily available via streaming (and the recently announced dramatic reboot in development) puts it squarely back in the zeitgeist for the first time in ages—and happens to coincide with series star Will Smith (not to be confused with his character, uh, Will Smith) being back in the spotlight for better (Bad Boys for Life is pretty good!) and worse (turning “entanglement” into a loaded word) in a way the once most bankable movie star in the world hasn’t been in quite some time. On top of all that, this year marks the 30th anniversary of one of the key sneakers the show helped make famous: the Air Jordan 5.
And Fresh Prince’s sneaker legacy literally begins with that shoe. Smith rocks a pair throughout the show’s opening title sequence, one of the most famous in the history of television. The Black/Metallic 5—the last of the pre-championship-era Jordans—is the primary sneaker on display (though eagle-eyed heads may notice some rad vintage Converse hoop joints on his friends at the playground). He follows them up with a pair of “Fire Red” 5’s in the series’ pilot.
Smith put his own spin on the shoes, yanking out the shoelaces and relying on the shoes’ interior elastic bands for support. He’d later explain on an episode of Sneaker Shopping that he was taking note from Run-DMC’s laceless Adidas Superstars. But at the time, it was just a cool, weird move—and a way, in the Jordan-dominated ’90s, to make the signature of the most famous basketball player on the planet his own.
Jordans weren’t the be-all-end-all of Will’s wardrobe on Fresh Prince, though. Throughout the series he showed a penchant for Nike basketball joints of all shapes and sizes, and he sparingly rocked with Adidas too. As such, the show’s six seasons quietly double as a sort of master text of hooping shoes of the era. Smith donned a number of killer basketball silhouettes, from the Air Flight 90 in a number of episodes to the immortal Air Penny 1 Orlando during the series finale’s Final Carlton Dance. Not all of them were hits, mind you—Nike’s response to the Reebok Pump, the Air 180 Pump High, proved such a dud that not even Will Smith rocking a pair on Fresh Prince multiple times could help them catch on (the hefty $175 price tag probably didn’t help).
The show made a conscious effort to keep Will’s onscreen wardrobe up with the times, so later seasons saw a wider berth of shoes incorporated into his rotation. While Jordans and basketball shoes were always the bedrock of his sneaker game, he also wound up wearing notable running and training silhouettes like the Air Max 180, Huarache Runner, and Huarache Trainer in season two.
Behind the scenes, Smith worked closely with his costume designer to ensure that his character’s sneaker game would be untouchable—literally. “I wanted them before they were out. I wanted people to see it on Fresh Prince before they were out,” Smith told Sneaker Shopping. (The extent to which this ended up being the case is a little hard to verify, but he definitely sported a pair of Air Force Maxes in an episode that aired around the same time that the Michigan’s Fab Five debuted them in 1993.) Smith’s other priority? “For me, the big thing was color,” he said. “The attitude of the character was always color...whatever was the most colorful [and that] nobody could have... They had to see it [on Fresh Prince] and then want to go get it.”
The show’s legacy of Jordan moments ran deep as the years went by. Plenty of movies and TV shows feature characters wearing Air Jordans. Not all of them end up having the brand release a commemorative sneaker, much less a whole series of them. Jordan Brand’s commitment to honoring the sneaker legacy of Fresh Prince began with 2013’s Air Jordan 5 Bel-Air, featuring a gray suede upper offset by purple, lime, and hot pink accents and patterns, as well as a loud neon green sole. It was a smash hit, selling out quickly and reselling for well over $500 these days.
The 2018 Fresh Prince silhouette drew a bit more directly from the show, featuring an update of the classic “grape” colorway with a pretty inspired touch: Like those rocked by Will himself during the show’s run, they don’t come with laces—and in fact have their lace holes filled in so as to eliminate the option entirely. The shoes also feature “West Philadelphia” emblazoned across the lowermost part of the tongues. This was a more direct collaboration with the show (Smith himself did an unboxing video on his official YouTube) and included a highly limited Friends & Family edition with a metallic gold upper. They’re crazy hard to come by and run as high as $20K on resale sites these days. Naturally, NBA sneaker god P. J. Tucker recently busted a pair out on the court.
That’s perhaps the greatest single testament to the show’s influence on the sneaker scene—that a company as notoriously picky as Jordan Brand is about who it collaborates with updated one of their legacy designs to replicate the signature styling of the show’s lead. The collaboration makes its return this month. It’s technically not an official Fresh Prince product (the site advertises it as the Air Jordan 5 Ghost Green), but it’s clearly an update of the 2013 colorway, swapping out the gray upper for a crisp white one and largely keeping the loud ’90s pattern that made up the accents of the original—and make it clear what inspired it.
Today hype is easier than ever to manufacture. All it takes for a sneaker to become a must-cop is a handful of social media posts from the same dozen sneaker influencers ahead of the sale date. Back during Fresh Prince’s original television run, it was harder to come by. That makes the show’s lasting legacy in the world of sneakers, one that has spanned decades and a number of collaborations with one of the top dogs in the industry, all the more impressive. A dedication to picking the coolest sneakers of the time, making sure to get them before anybody else could, and finding ways to wear them that kids watching might not have seen before left an indelible impression. The result? Will Smith, both the fictional character and the man himself, remains an all-time sneaker icon. Not bad for a kid from West Philadelphia, born and raised.