The making of PAN and Nike’s euphoric, club-inspired collaboration at Milan Design Week

It’s a sunny Monday afternoon, day one of Milan Design Week 2025. I’m standing in a garage space underneath a block of flats in a quiet, residential neighbourhood in the east of the city. But given the silhouettes of human figures moving in the shadowy gloom, the pulses of light, the stale and smoky air, and the washes of electronic music, we could easily be inside Berghain, Berlin’s techno temple, at 4am on a Sunday. Well, we could if we were cool enough to make it past the German club’s notoriously strict bouncers.

Luckily, Bill Kouligas – the shaven-headed embodiment of Berliner street-chic – is here to confirm our assessment of ‘The Suspended Hour’. It’s a ‘spatial intervention’ created by the founder of PAN, the Berlin record label and multidisciplinary design house, in collaboration with Niklas Bildstein Zaar at Sub, an architectural firm in the German capital. ‘We’ve been raised inside [Berghain] for 12 years,’ says Kouligas, an Athens-born musician, DJ, curator and designer whose label roster foregrounds shape-shifting electronic artists such as Arca and Eartheater. ‘So a lot of the DNA of our work emerged from that ongoing relationship with that space. It’s been very significant for the growth of the label and the engagement with the music community.’

Berlin-based record label PAN unveils Nike collaboration during Milan Design Week 2025

This dark, throbbing space – soundtracked by an hour-long score composed by Kouligas, and with a giant model of Pan, god of the wild/sex/music lurking at its heart – is a fitting launch environment for his newest work. PAN x Nike Air Max 180 NIX is born of club culture and designed for wear in the kind of spaces where box-fresh shoes don’t stay box-fresh for long. That means a sleek trainer with a sturdy, BPM-friendly sole, a rubberised heel for added stability, and what they’re calling a ‘shrink-wrapped shroud’ – that is, a wipe-clean cowl on the dirt-magnet toes.

‘It’s a lifestyle shoe, it’s not a sports shoe,’ says the quiet-spoken Kouligas – although arguably the fashion-forward NIX will be both for those for whom a marathon session on the dancefloor is its own kind of sporting exertion. ‘So it’s nice to provide some solutions that allow it to exist [throughout] its use. The durability and core aesthetic values have to remain through time.’

This collaboration with Nike grew out of a previous Milan Design Week. In 2022, Kouligas was in town with ‘a very different project’. ‘Rituals Around The Machines’ was an installation with sound created with Ferrara architects HPO, based on ‘a very rudimentary construction site… I was sourcing all the sounds from the machines and processing them to create a soundscape that allowed people to get sucked into the experience and just stay there.’

It impressed some visiting ‘Nike people’. They were then plotting the comeback of the Air Max 180, originally launched in 1991. As Kouligas explains, the shoe ‘became synonymous with club culture in the 1990s because it was initially made out of mesh material. Because of the breathable aspect, a lot of ravers were wearing them – because they could literally last on the dancefloor for hours!’

Kouligas and PAN, then, were a great fit for Nike's ambitions for a retread of the iconic trainer. ‘They thought it would be interesting to work with a contemporary electronic music label to give it a new perspective, and bring it to a new area that hasn’t really been explored before.’

The US sportswear giant gave no notes or restrictions, simply providing the ‘classic silhouette’ as a basis for PAN’s imagination. It took Kouligas two years to develop, he and his team cycling through three iterations before arriving at this fourth, finished version, steadily discarding ‘lots of different ideas’ and ‘reducing, reducing, reducing’ before arriving at the shoes’ core principles: ‘durability and innovative aesthetics’. Or, if you like, a soulful sole.

And it’s only the beginning. NIX is also the name of PAN’s ‘new initiative for creative research and development’. As Kouligas frames it, ‘the shoe is also called NIX because it’s the birth of this chapter. It’s going to entail everything else that I do besides music. They’re going to work in parallel. It’s a mirroring entity to PAN. And it’s the opposite: PAN means everything and NIX means nothing.’

Although it’s surely no coincidence that, in Greek mythology, Nyx means something else, too: the goddess and personification of night.

Check out more of our Milan Design Week 2025 must-sees