Los Angeles Lakers guard Bronny James quietly debuted a new logo for his signature shoe during last week’s game against the Cleveland Cavaliers: a lowercase b (for Bronny) that features a 9 (for his jersey number) inside the letterform.
The logo appeared on a bright pink pair of James’s father’s shoe, the LeBron Witness IX, but there was another logo on the shoe that was notable: a backwards Nike Swoosh.
Since debuting in 1971, the Nike Swoosh has become one of the most iconic brand logos of all time. Still, Nike designers have occasionally had some fun with it by breaking brand guidelines and flipping the logo around. Though there’s no formal rule for who gets the backwards swoosh, throughout Nike history, the flipped logo has shown up on shoes worn by some of the strongest-willed players across sports and culture.
The history of Nike’s backwards swoosh
The backwards Swoosh appeared first in 1994 on the Nike Air Darwin, the big, chunky, boot-like sneaker worn by Dennis Rodman, and the mark later reappeared on Rodman’s Nike Air Ndestrukt. The backwards logo made sense for an eccentric player like Rodman, who was known for his hairstyles and tattoos as much as for his skills on the court.
Rodman set the pattern for when Nike pulls out the backwards logo. It also appeared on the 1994 Nike Air Flare worn by tennis player Andre Agassi, another athlete at the top of his game who was recognized widely for his style and attitude.
In the 2010s, the backwards logo appeared on the shoes of other superstars and made appearances in youth-oriented crossover collaborations. The backwards Swoosh appeared on James’s dad shoe, the 2012 Nike LeBron X, as well as on the Nike Kobe AD NXT in 2017, one year after Kobe Bryant retired. On Giannis Antetokounmpo’s 2019 Nike Freak shoes, the backwards Swoosh was iridescent and memorably set on the midsole to make them look like they’re from the future. The backwards logo on the PG 2, a 2018 collaboration with Playstation, was bright neon colors.
Travis Scott has popularized the backwards Nike logo since 2019, when the Travis Scott x Air Jordan 1 became the first in a string of Nike shoes from the rapper to use the backwards mark. Though Rodman complained that Scott “copied” him, the pair made up in 2024 when Rodman appeared in an ad for a velvet brown color way of Scott’s Air Jordan 1 Low OG, which, yes, had a backwards logo.
Other global brands with a simple, well-known logos like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have found creative ways to deconstruct or reinvent their logos by crushing them or turning them upside down, and Nike turned its Swoosh on the side in 2024 on women’s soccer jerseys to celebrate the growing popularity of the game.
For such a valuable brand asset like the Swoosh, tweaking it signals a break from conventions. By debuting his signature Nike logo alongside the backwards mark, James joins a storied design tradition.