Nike revives What The LA Air Force 1 for Holiday 2026
Nike is bringing back the 2019 What The LA Air Force 1 in Holiday 2026, packing Lakers gold, Dodgers blue and Kings black into a $125 city collage.
Nike is reviving one of its loudest city sneakers for Holiday 2026: the Air Force 1 Low What The LA returns in White/Black-Hyper Jade, style code CT1117-100, with a $125 retail price. The pair leans hard into Los Angeles identity, stacking Lakers purple and gold, Dodgers blue and Kings black across a layered build of suede, leather and glossy overlays, then finishing it with city-wide Los Angeles script. It reads less like team merch and more like a street-level tribute to the way L.A. turns sports into style.
That is exactly why the shoe still has pull seven years after the original 2019 drop. The first What The LA launched alongside What The NYC as part of Nike’s city-versus-city concept, and it made the Air Force 1 feel like a scrapbook of Los Angeles pride rather than a straight archive remix. Earlier What The pairs often pulled from older Nike models; this one built its whole identity from the city itself, which is why it landed as a sharper cultural object than a simple mashup. The formula worked then, and it still does now because the shoe is not pretending to be subtle.
The 2019 version was a full-blown chromatic collage, with panels borrowing from the Lakers, Clippers, Sparks, Rams, Chargers, Kings, Ducks, Dodgers, Angels, LAFC and Galaxy. It had “Los Angeles” branding embroidered on the heel and printed on the insole, plus speckled midsoles and translucent outsoles that gave the sneaker enough texture to keep the chaos from feeling cheap. Nike had it slated for Nike.com and select retailers at $130, with release dates floating between October 1, 2019 and November 1, 2019 depending on the report, but the headline never changed: this was a sneaker built to show off how many identities one city can cram into a single pair of Air Force 1s.
The comeback is not just retro heat for nostalgia’s sake, even if nostalgia is doing plenty of work here. Holiday 2026 gives Nike a chance to re-run one of its smartest fan-service ideas with cleaner timing and a slightly lower $125 price tag. In a market flooded with minimalism, “What The LA” still wins by refusing restraint, and that kind of maximal, franchise-heavy storytelling still feels built for a sneaker audience that wants its pairs to say something before they even hit the pavement.
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