Inside the Kitchen, Hatfield’s desk sits at the terminus of a narrow corridor-like space, at least 75 yards long, that stretches the length of a curvilinear wall of windows. The area around his desk is a visual reminder of his exalted status at Nike: An enormous drawing of Michael Jordan hangs on the wall behind him, and 31 pairs of Air Jordans—the series for which he’s most famous—are strung on a rod along a nearby window. He sits surrounded by all of the Kitchen’s top designers and engineers, some perched at high drafting tables. Pinned to a bulletin board nearby are what appear to be blueprints for shoes of radical weirdness, and prototypes are piled on desks and spilling onto the floors. Exotic socklike things. Track shoes that look like Victorian witches’ boots. An orange shoe-shaped object webbed a little sadistically with high-tensile cords. Foot forms (mannequin feet, basically) are everywhere, lending the Kitchen a podiatric atmosphere. A large open space adjacent to the designers’ area is filled with rows of high tech sewing machines, injection-molding devices, and laser cutters. There are spools of thread the size of footballs and enormous drawer units containing swatches of synthetic textiles. A few of the sewing machines have been modified so that they can sew with carbon fiber. This part of the Kitchen is where a specialized team of “concept creators” works its magic, fabricating prototypes basically by hand, taking shoe designs from 2-D to 3-D. It brings to mind the workshop of some kind of futuristic cobbler, which is not so far off. (I’m one of the few journalists ever admitted to the facility, and I’m under strict orders not to photograph—or even, it sometimes seems, commit to memory—any of the designs I might accidentally catch sight of on someone’s computer screen, or sitting around on desks in prototype form.)