Flo Milli revives Nike Air Rift in celebrity style moment

Flo Milli showed up in a white Nike Air Rift at BET’s Celebrity Basketball Game in Los Angeles, giving the split-toe shoe a clean celebrity reset. The look landed inside BET Experience 2026, which ran June 25 to 27 and packed in performances, special appearances and the first-ever standalone BETX Celebrity Basketball Game at USC Galen Center.

The game had real cast energy. Shad “Bow Wow” Moss and Yung Miami hosted, while Flo Milli, G Herbo, Key Glock and others hit the court. Gilbert Arenas, Paul Pierce, Dave East, Fabolous, Jim Jones and Maino coached the action, so the sneaker was walking into a room that already knew how to read a moment. Flo Milli chose the kind of shoe that does not try to look normal and wins anyway. The Air Rift’s split toe makes it look like a sneaker that got cut open and rebuilt by someone with better taste than the market.

That weirdness is exactly why it still works. Nike says the Air Rift was the first Nike shoe to use a split toe, with a shape inspired by Kenya’s Great Rift Valley and barefoot running, built to encourage more natural motion. The model first landed in the mid-1990s, with coverage placing the debut in either 1995 or 1996, right in Nike’s experimental stretch alongside shoes like the Air Huarache and Air Max Plus. It came back as a lifestyle silhouette and got its first re-release in 2015, which tells you this was never just a performance runner. It was always a fashion object waiting for the right crowd.

Nike has been nudging it back into view with new product, not nostalgia alone. The women’s Air Rift 2 in Summit White and Swan dropped June 25 for $125, a clean price point for a shoe that still feels stranger than most mainstream sneakers. In January, NikeSKIMS launched its first footwear with a Rift-based split-toe design, and Kim Kardashian called the shoe a “90s icon,” adding that the collaboration was meant to feel “minimalist, sleek and flattering.”

That is the lane the Air Rift has found again: not basic, not safe, not broadly pretty in the usual sneaker sense. Flo Milli wearing it at a high-visibility BET event makes the case better than any trend deck could. The split toe is still divisive, but that is the point. In a sneaker market crowded with forgettable retro reissues, the Air Rift has the one thing the rest do not: a face people remember.