Nike has revived its partnership with Tom Sachs with a sneaker release in this fall, less than two years after former studio staff accused the artist of creating a toxic workplace environment, including allegations of sexual harassment.
The allegations, which also included bullying and inadequate pay, were published in Curbed in early 2023. Nike cut ties with Sachs in the fallout of the article. The forthcoming release of the Mars Yard 3.0 sneaker is one of several Sachs was commissioned to co-design with the sports retailer in 2012, when their collaboration first launched.
The Sachs controversy began with an anonymous job listing on the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) website, a widely-trafficked job employment resource, for an executive assistant to a “high-profile art world family,” that included a prodigious laundry of responsibilities not commiserate with its relatively low pay expectations. Art professionals soon suspected Sachs and his wife, former gallery director Sarah Hoover, to be behind the post. (Various former employees of Sachs’s studio were bound by non-disclosure agreements, according to the Curbed investigation.)
In the subsequent Curbed article, former employees described Sachs’ studio as hostile and unduly strict, and its leader as prone to using offensive language, as well as other eyebrow-raising practices that seemingly drew from his artistic preoccupation with political oppression.
In May 2023, Sachs, who is in his fifties, published a statement in The New York Times that addressed the allegations and pledged a commitment to be improving his studio’s working conditions. Shortly prior to the apology, Nike announced that it had paused the collaboration with Sachs which had helped the artist enter the luxury world.
After starting to work with Nike in 2012, Sachs became more public with speaking outside of arts paces about his work’s ties to luxury. In 2014, he gave a lecture at The New York Times Luxury Conference where he described how his sculpture-based practice involves intersections of branding, consumer culture and political violence. By 2017, a second release of the Mars Yard sneakers had launched and his last release with the brand, the General Purpose Shoe, released in 2022.
The latest move to reprise the art sneaker collaboration with Sachs comes after a steep fall in Nike’s revenue for 2024, which the company reported had fallen 8 percent from the previous year after digital sales dropped unexpectedly. The shortfall is the worst financial performance Nike has reported since the Covid-19 pandemic.
