Five years ago, Milanese writer Lodovico Pignatti Morano published the very-limited-edition volume, Le Silver: An Italian Oral History of the Nike Air Max 97, in partnership with Kaleidoscope. 150 pages were dedicated to a crowd-sourced consideration of the sneaker—later nicknamed the Silver Bullet after its likeness to the glimmering Japanese Shinkansen trains—on its 20th birthday and in its original, unmistakable colorway.

Though the Silver Bullets are not the only Nikes that come with tome-worthy lore, few distinct colorways could boast such a layered biography across demographics and locales, and in a way that so aptly illustrates how people’s specific experiences around consumption and identity give meaning and value to both objects and brands. In fact, brands themselves are often baffled by the afterlives of the stuff they put into the world, and the testimonies that came to comprise Le Silver were originally commissioned as a report for Nike, meant to explain the astonishing popularity of the Silver Bullets in Italy in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The first Air Max to outfit the full length of the sole with Nike’s bubble cushioning system, the 97 was dreamed up by newbie designer Christian Tresser. Aside from the Zoom Spiridon, Tresser was mostly focused on soccer cleats, such as the groundbreaking Nike Mercurial (first seen on the feet of Brazilian superstar Ronaldo Nazário at the 1998 World Cup), for which he was experimenting with reflective silver trimmings, hoping cameras would capture the light as it bounced off the shoe. This fascination came to further fruition on the 97 upper, which combined silver and white synthetic leather with 3M and metallic mesh and was said to be inspired by a single droplet undulating across the surface of still water.