Why Tom Sachs Created His Latest Version of the NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe
- April 07, 2026
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“Bricolage means making or repairing something using limited, available resources,” says artist Tom Sachs, rummaging around in a public New York City trashcan. It’s a gray winter day in Manhattan and Sachs has just ventured outside of his Centre Street studio to look for materials to complete a sculpture.
“I’m making a lamp,” he says, extracting an industrial-sized mayonnaise jar from a clump of wet newspaper and other assorted garbage. Discarded objects, to Sachs, represent an opportunity for renewal.
Sachs’ bricolage practice has been the basis of his work as an artist for four decades, and it is a driving force behind his newest collaboration, the NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe “Bricolage.” His studio houses his massive stock of accumulated materials, from found extension cords and Con Edison barriers to dozens of varieties of duct tape gathered across multiple continents.
NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe “Bricolage” by Tom Sachs
“From the resources around us, we can create our own worlds.”
Tom Sachs, Nike collaborator and artist
Even the studio itself is a bricolage artwork: an ever-changing sculpture whose interior design is purposefully altered on a regular basis to meet the display and building needs of Sachs’ body of work. Since the early 1990s, when Sachs moved into the space, walls go up and come down while smaller sculptures, themselves bricolage creations, change the floor plan.
But Sachs’ history with bricolage extends back even further. “When I was maybe seven or eight years old,” Sachs writes, in his recently published Tom Sachs Guide, “my dad really wanted a Nikon FM2 camera, but instead he bought the Olympus OM-1 that he could afford. In school, I made him the Nikon FM2 out of clay. I used what I had. I did the best I could for someone I loved. That elementary school sculpture set a precedent for the rest of my career. The things we create for ourselves using what’s available have transformative power. My Nikon couldn’t take a single picture, but it far surpasses the real thing in life force, spiritual weight, and love.”
Beyond clay Nikons and mayonnaise jar lamps, Sachs has made Brancusi-inspired sculptures from plastic McDonald’s trays and a lifesize Apollo-era Lunar Excursion Module from foamcore and plywood.
“From the resources around us,” says Sachs, “we can create our own worlds.”
Sachs’ previous Nike sneaker releases have been informed by his bricolage ethos, just as his sculptures are. “The first Mars Yard incorporated Vectran,” says Sachs, of the off-white, satin-finished, multifilament yarn he chose for the upper. “It’s a material I learned about while working with NASA’s Jet Prospulsion Lab (JPL). They were using it to make airbags that would help their Rover land on Mars.” Sachs then used the material to make a shoe for the scientists who worked in the Mars Yard, the Mars-like terrain at JPL in Pasadena, California where Mars mission details were planned. “I used Vectran because it was the best and most durable resource I had at hand,” says Sachs.
Sachs' studio houses his massive stock of accumulated materials, from found extension cords and Con Edison barriers to dozens of varieties of duct tape gathered across multiple continents.
Since its 2022 debut, the NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe (GPS) franchise has had bricolage built into its design. The waffle-patterned sole pays tribute to the greatest instance of bricolage in the history of footwear, when running coach Bill Bowerman poured liquid urethane directly into his wife’s waffle maker in 1971 in the hopes of creating a track shoe with better grip. The donning straps on the GPS are made from the same nylon as high-performance automotive seatbelts.
For Sachs’ latest GPS, bricolage isn’t merely reflected in the materials. Amplifying ideas about bricolage is the reason the sneaker exists. “Bricolage is a word artists use, but it’s more than a way of making sculpture, it’s really a way of life," Sachs says.
Sachs acknowledges the paradox of creating a mass-produced shoe to emphasize the vitality and importance of the handmade. “Sneakers can do things other art forms can’t,” he says. “I can make bricolage sculptures for my entire career, but more people will learn to embrace what bricolage is, and why it matters, from a shoe than from the rest of my work combined.”
A functioning lamp that Tom Sachs created from a mayonnaise jar he found in a New York City trashcan.
Returning to his studio, Sachs places the mayonnaise jar on the same welding table he’s been making sculptures on since the early 1990s; it, too, is a found object. As he begins cleaning the jar, preparing to change its function and its meaning from something cast away to something coveted, luminous and useful, Sachs explains why bricolage is essential to our survival.
“Our most precious resources are all limited,” he says. “Clean water, fresh air, the time we have to be alive, together, on this planet — these things are not infinite. We must do our best to treat our dearest resources with care.”
Since its 2022 debut, the NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe (GPS) franchise has had bricolage built into its design, from the waffle-patterned sole to the nylon donning straps.
“I wear this iteration of the GPS to symbolize my lifelong commitment to bricolage, and to act on it."
Tom Sachs, Nike collaborator and artist
Bricolage, says Sachs, is a way to look more closely, and more urgently, at what’s around us and to make a better world with what we already have.
“I wear this iteration of the GPS to symbolize my lifelong commitment to bricolage, and to act on it,” says Sachs, continuing to repurpose his jar.
Sachs attaches a piece of pipe he brought back from a construction site on Canal Street to a plywood base he’s cut on his bandsaw. He threads a wire through both the base and pipe before converting the jar’s lid into a socket, where he screws in the lightbulb. The plastic jar itself is reborn as a lampshade. As the final step, Sachs attaches his handmade ceramic bead to the pull chain. The bead is a sculpture. The bead is bricolage. Sachs plugs in the lamp, pulls on the bead, power surges throughout the old jar and it glows.
“Bricolage,” Sachs says, “is a source of light.”