Seven years is a long time for a shoe nobody expected to come back. On October 22, 2026, Nike brings the Air Force 1 Low "What The LA" back to shelves at $125, style code CT1117-100, the same deliberately mismatched pair that first dropped in autumn 2019 and then quietly vanished. Sneaker Bar Detroit's Mason Tiniuc confirmed the date on October 14, and Hypebeast followed on October 15 with official images.
If you missed it the first time, here is the premise. The left shoe and the right shoe share a last, a sole shape and almost nothing else. One is a Lakers shoe. The other is a Dodgers shoe. Both say Los Angeles in script on the heel. It is loud, it is specific, and for Indian buyers who have spent 2026 watching one "LA" release after another, it is the only one that bothers to tell the whole city's story on a single pair.
Left Foot Lakers, Right Foot Dodgers
Left shoe first. Red toe, white overlays, tan suede across the quarter, and a heel in full Lakers purple. Then the right shoe throws all of that away: Dodgers blue up front, green down the sides, gold wrapped round the back. No single team owns either foot. That was the point in 2019. It still is.
The details are where the pair earns its keep. Sneaker Freaker's original 2019 write-up pointed out the basketball-textured Swooshes and the baseball-stitch panel stitching, small nods to the two sports that own the city. Add speckled midsoles, icy translucent outsoles, mismatched laces and that Los Angeles script on the lateral heel and insole, and you have a shoe with more going on than most collabs at three times the price.
The "What The" format itself has a lineage. Nike SB started it with the "What The Dunk" in 2007, then Nike Basketball ran it through the Kobe 8, KD 6 and LeBron 11. The AF1 version arrived in 2019 as a pair of city tributes, this LA pair alongside a "What The NYC". Of the two, LA always had the easier job, because its teams' colours were already built to sit next to each other on a jersey wall.
Nike Air Force 1 Low What The LA: Price and Release Date
Both Sneaker Bar Detroit and Hypebeast list the October 22 release at $125 through Nike and select retailers. House of Heat has the same date but quotes $130, which happens to be what StockX records as the 2019 retail price, so expect the final number to land on one of those two. The official colourway listing is White/Black-Hyper Jade, which describes very little of what you are looking at. Do not let it confuse you at checkout.
The 2019 date is fuzzier than you would think. Sneaker Freaker's listing said October 1; StockX logs November 1. Pick one. What matters is that the LA pair has not been on a shelf since.
Resale, honestly: there is no live number to give you. StockX already shows a restock date of October 22, 2026 on the product page, but the market data would not load when we checked this week. Anyone quoting you a premium right now is pricing your impatience, not the shoe.
What It Costs to Land One in India
Nike India's Air Force 1 page does not list this pair, so for now the math is the import math. At the open.er-api.com rate of ₹95.25 per dollar on October 15, 2026, $125 is ₹11,907. Footwear into India then carries 20 percent basic customs duty, an agriculture cess of 4 percent of the declared value, a 2.4 percent social welfare surcharge and 18 percent IGST stacked on top, which comes to 49.15 percent per the ICEGATE-based calculator at Eximpe (rates as at May 13, 2026). Landed, that is roughly ₹17,760 before anyone's forwarding fee.
Now compare. A plain Air Force 1 '07 on nike.in costs ₹9,695 to ₹11,895 this week. Our Air Force 1 '07 LX "Sunflower" sits at ₹15,295. So an imported "What The LA" lands about ₹2,500 above our dearest AF1, for a shoe Nike sells through ordinary retailers rather than as a numbered collab. Buy it because you love it. Do not buy it to flip.
Sizing. AF1s run roomy, and under all that paint this is a standard build. Between sizes? Go half down. Leather and suede will not give the way knit does, though you get more toe room than a Dunk and a properly padded collar, so the half-size drop rarely pinches.
Our Take: The Rare Mismatch That Works
Most "What The" shoes are a mess by design, and that is fine on a Kobe where the panels are small. On an Air Force 1 the panels are huge, so every colour decision is on display. This pair works because the LA sports palette is already coherent: purple and gold, blue and white, red and black have been sitting next to each other on jerseys for decades. The result reads like a city, not like a sample room floor.
Is the hype real? Modestly. This is not a Travis pair and it will not sell out in India's grey market overnight. It is a good AF1 for people who actually like Air Force 1s and want one that nobody else at the Bangalore meet-up is wearing. Pair it with plain black or washed grey denim and let the shoe do all the talking, because it will.
Seven years on, the "What The LA" is still the most honest tribute shoe Nike has made for a city, because it never pretended the city had one colour. If you want an Air Force 1 with character while you wait, see what is in stock on our Nike page. Sources: Sneaker Bar Detroit, Hypebeast.
Want the backstory on why this silhouette still matters forty-plus years in? Read our history of the Nike Air Force 1, or compare this pair with the plain Air Force 1 Low '01 Triple White we covered earlier this year.
