How to snap up a pair of the coveted kicks on MR PORTER before they sell out.

Hey Presto! Nike’s next magic trick: a sneaker that is likely to disappear very quickly indeed. For its fifth, and possibly final, collaboration with the sporting superbrand, Munich-based design studio ACRONYM returns to the shoe it reworked to great effect two years ago. The Air Presto Mid ACRONYM will be available in three colourways – Racer Pink, Dynamic Yellow and Grey Black, with nods to its most recent revision, the Vapormax, released earlier this year – from today, and MR PORTER is one of the few retailers to stock them. Although blink and they’ll be gone.

Noted for bringing advanced technological detailing with a hint of militaristic fetishism to clothing and footwear, ACRONYM made a name for itself in the early 2000s with the AG Clone MD jacket it produced for snowboarding brand Burton. With a built-in MP3 and MiniDisc player and control panel on the sleeve, the jacket made wearable technology – up until then only hypothetical – a reality, and was listed among the inventions of 2002 by Time magazine. Work with clients including Arc’teryx, Stone Island and United Arrows Japan eventually, in 2014, led to Nike approaching the studio’s co-founder Mr Errolson Hugh, tasking him with reviving the brand’s mothballed ACG mountain and outdoors line. But under the ACRONYM banner, the partnership also brought a series of radical reworkings of some of Nike’s most famous shoes.

The first collaboration, the Lunar Force 1 ACRONYM, which dropped in 2015, was met with some bafflement from an industry that, truth be told, has only just caught up with this forward-thinking sneaker. However, it earned an appreciative nod from Mr Bruce Kilgore, the designer of the original Air Force 1, who rather than question the zip that runs across the Lunar’s upper, asked only why ACRONYM had put it on the outer side of the shoe.

A year later, the first iteration of the Air Presto Mid ACRONYM arrived. Given the studio’s reputation for bleeding-edge design, the choice of shoe makes sense: the original Air Presto was the one with which Nike kicked down the door of the 21st century. The cumulative product of the previous decade’s innovation – employing the sock-like upper element first seen in 1991’s Huarache – the project proved to be the forerunner to the Nike Free range. The embrace of technology was at the core of the shoe, with the design of Apple’s iMac G3 said to be an influence behind the sheath housing the neoprene sock. Another step into the unknown: the shoe was also one of the first to feature digitally printed graphics on its upper. ACRONYM took this idea and, well, ran with it.

Beyond the waterproof zip fastening and an ankle collar with pull-up tabs, ACRONYM’s take on the Air Presto presented a complete technical upgrade on the original. With the 2016 version, two of the three colourways were in keeping with the studio’s appreciation of military hardware, dominated by black and olive shades. The third – a vivid clash of neons duking it out on a black backdrop – points to this return to the shoe.

Released in limited numbers, this latest reworking of the sneaker is not expected to hang around. With the announcement that Mr Hugh’s tenure at ACG is due to come to an end before the year is out, this might be your last chance to take a step into the future.