When professional skateboarder Nicole Hause was invited to Nike headquarters in Oregon she had an inkling that they might give her a shoe, and she arrived prepared. The shoe company gave her carte blanche. “Honestly, I would say it’s a hundred percent exactly how I want,” said the pro skater. Her white Nike SB Dunk Low Pro sneakers have a floating swoosh in blue-and-white plaid and a double chain with a medallion, which can be removed and repurposed as a bracelet or bag charm. The hummingbird on the insole references Hause’s love of birds and her penchant for aerial skateboarding.
Not that this is a fashion shoe, but Hause’s instincts are good; we saw lots of plaid at the spring shows, and the idea of a garment having a bijou quality is au courant as well. Although this dunk is unisex, the fact that Nike giving Hause the opportunity to create a named shoe speaks to the expansion and growing recognition of women in skateboarding—and in the sneaker space. (See Avavav for Adidas for spring 2025 and Tela D’Amore’s recent match-up with Jordan Brand.) Big changes are the result of many smaller steps. With this collaboration, Hause takes a flying leap forward in her signature fashion. Here, she talks to us about how she started skating, the Swedish pants she can’t live without, and how skate culture is changing.
How did the collaboration with Nike come about?
I’ve been contracted with them since 2018; I wear their shoes and apparel when I compete. It’s a really natural relationship; all the people who work on Nike skateboarding are all skateboarders, so they all understand it. They’re all very cool and easy to work with. I think that over the years, they started to see me come into my own and become a pro skateboarder. I think they were just like, “This is the right time for Nicole to get it.” I’m so glad [this opportunity] came when it did. I feel like I really know myself and was able to design something that was good.
Can you tell us about all the things that make your Nike SB Dunk Lo Pro special?
I love this quote: “Good things happen over time, but great things happen all at once,” because I feel like this whole design came to me. I just knew exactly what I wanted to do—and this was before they even told me they were going to give me a shoe. They said they wanted to have a meeting with me in Oregon, and I was like, okay, this is my time, it’s happening, so I wanted to have something ready.
I’ve always thought about designing a shoe, and I knew I wanted to do a plain white leather shoe with a blue swoosh; it’s my favorite [color] combination. I was wearing belt chains a lot while skating, and I was like, “I’ve never seen a chain on a shoe. I wonder if we could do that?” So I came up with the chain idea, mimicking a double-chain bracelet I was wearing at the time. And then I was like, “I think plaid is going to hit; I think that’s next.” So I decided to do a plaid blue swoosh, and I was very specific about the material; I wanted it to feel kind of like clothing that could rip and fray if you skated it. And I didn’t want the swoosh to be attached, I wanted a free floating swoosh that doesn’t attach to the back of the heel.
When I was designing it, there were a couple times that I was nervous, [thinking] “Is this too much? Is it too flashy? Is it not skateboarding enough?” I’m stoked about the shoe, and there was a lot of serendipity around it. I designed it in January or February 2023, and this year I feel like Billie Eilish posted plaid a lot, and then her album came out and it was all blue.
You can remove the chains. I can put the chain around my wrist and use it as a bracelet, which is really cool, but I think it depends on how big your shoe size is and how big your wrist is. The medallion says Victory of the People because that’s what my name means in Greek. I’m a bird watcher and there’s a hummingbird on the insole. I love flying on my skateboard, so I kind of associate with birds in that way. Hummingbirds are just really special; they’re the smallest bird, but they’re really tough, they can travel really far, and they are the only birds that can fly in all directions. I think it is really cool that they can fly backwards because one of the things I like to do on my skateboard is go into the air forward, but land backwards.
Where can you buy the sneakers?
These are Quick Strike Dunks, which usually means there are fewer of them, and they’ll be harder to get. Nike does this thing where they don’t sell the shoes online and allows skate shops to have them first. They want to keep the shops alive.
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How did you come to skating?
I had all guy friends growing up. I didn’t think there was a difference between men and women, I was just like, “I want to hang out with boys, that’s who I have most in common with.” We all got skateboards and one of my friends had a birthday party at a skate park in my hometown in Minnesota. I went there and I was like, “What? There are ramps?!” I just didn’t understand that there was this whole other side to skating because we were just skating in the driveway. I was naturally balanced because I had done gymnastics for seven years, from age 2 to 9. I was skating kind of easily and I just fell in love with it. I realized, you can go fast, you can go in the air—you can fly, essentially. All the excitement just exploded in my mind and I never stopped. That skate park was only there for three months. My parents owned a construction company in Minnesota and my dad was able to build me my first mini ramp and when I outgrew it, a vertical ramp, which is essentially a 12 foot ramp and it has 90 degrees on it.
I really got lucky in the sense that I fell in love with something and I was able to do it in a place [where] accessibility to skate parks was limited and not that many people were into it. All my guy friends [quit] after six months and I was pretty much the only one who skated in my high school of 3,000 people. It’s funny to look back on those times. I knew in my heart that I truly love skating because I was doing it by myself and no one thought I was cool. No one thought, “Nicole is a good skateboarder, this is going to take her far or something.” They all just were like, “Whatever. I guess that’s what she likes to do.”
How did you start competing?
My dad wanted to get into acting so we went to California [where] I discovered there were skate parks everywhere. I went to the All Girls Skate Jam Clinic in Venice Beach and I met a bunch of people and then from there they invited me to something else and then it just kind of snowballed. By the time I was 12 or 13, I had a mentor who was a pro-woman skateboarder for Vans, and who was also an Olympic snowboarder back in the day. The whole community of women who skated wasn’t big; it felt like there were maybe 30 of us. I started going to California for a few weeks at a time for contests; all the dots started connecting….
When did you go pro?
There are a couple different ways you can be a pro skateboarder. When I was 15, I was in my first pro contest by accident; they had divided it by age and the last age bracket was 15 to 28—and they were all pros. So I kind of got thrown into that and I ended up doing good. When I started getting paid by Nike [in 2018], that was also another pro milestone. The ultimate is having your name on a board; that’s the ultimate goal and that happened for me in 2022 [with Real skateboards].
What does the situation for women in skateboarding look like today?
When I was 15, maybe there were one or two girls making money and actually being able to live off skateboarding. (This was a little bit before social media.) Now there are probably 25, 30 of us that can make it a full-time job, but in terms of just really good skateboarders who are women in the world, there are millions now. It’s crazy how much it’s blown up. At the very beginning it felt so small and now I feel like there are almost as many girls skating as there are guys. It might be like 40% women to 60% men, but I’d say it’s pretty close. It’s really cool to see the whole transition of it in this crazy way.
It’s great that there are more women skating, but has the culture changed too?
It’s starting to get there. The industry was created by guys and made around guys, you could say it’s a boy’s club in a way because they’re all friends and they’re going to put each other on the team. I’d say there was a major change in 2018. Most contests did not have equal prizes for men and women. I think what really [started things off] was a contest in Brazil where they shot a photo of the podium with the guy holding a $30,000 check and the girl next to him, one for $5,000. That got everyone talking.
At the Olympics everything has to be equal. The pay equalized, but there still weren’t as many events for women as there were for men, so it was like we were still held back in a way. I think it’s really hard for women to evolve when there’s not enough opportunity to [do so]. When they started to equalize the number of events between men and women, it really boomed. Then it was like, big skate brands would have one token girl. I feel like the third phase [going beyond signaling representation] is just starting. We’ve come so far, but we have some distance to go still.
You were a member of the first national team in 2019 and competed in the Olympic qualifiers. Can you speak about skateboarding becoming an Olympics sport?
That was just so crazy! I couldn’t even fathom that skateboarding would be in the Olympics. It felt like it came out of nowhere and it kind of changed my whole life. The Olympics is such a big deal to everyone, it’s worldwide. I feel like the Olympics really changed the whole geography of skateboarding, because you have the Thrasher heads and the core skateboarders who are kind of like, “We’re not a sport, we’re a culture, we’re an art form.” The Olympics puts skateboarding in the category of sport and you are judged with points [rather than] style. It really changed skateboarding, mostly in a good way. I think the core of skateboarding can hate on the Olympics, but I think it brought so many more eyes to skateboarding, so many more opportunities and I think it kind of gives skateboarding the credit it deserves—maybe not in the way the people who started skateboarding in the 1980s want it to be—but I think it helps a lot in a lot of ways.
What does it mean to be a woman in skateboarding in terms of getting dressed? Is that something you think about?
Early on, when I moved to California, I felt like you had to dress like a girl a little bit because that’s just what the world was feeding you and felt like you had to play that role. But [my style] is always about functionality. I always wore pants that I could move my legs in; even if they were skin tight, I could move my legs in them. In that era I had 10 pairs of American Eagle stretch pants that were tight but flared a little bit at the end and I would cut them so you could see my socks, because at the time, seeing your socks was really cool. I would usually wear a Polo Ralph Lauren tee. I had all the different colors, and I would just wear the same pants with a different T-shirt all the time.
I definitely tried to play the female role for a long time. Things have definitely changed now. I think a lot of fashion is based on skating and the kind of unisex, baggy clothing style has transitioned into all these different sectors of fashion. More recently, I just found pants that worked and were really cool and had a kind of unisex vibe; they’re Polar skate pants from Sweden. I feel like so many girls wear them. They’re so perfect; they’re not too baggy and they hold up nice for skating. It definitely seems like now there are no gender roles in skating at all. And I know a lot of brands are trying to do unisex everything, which I think is really cool because you should never feel like you have to dress a certain way, you should always just try to feel good. If I’m not feeling my outfit, I’m not going to skate as good.
What role do you see style playing in your career going forward?
Sunglasses and shoes are the first [collaborations] that I’ve done, but I feel like it’s just the beginning for me. I’ve always loved fashion. Growing up, I loved baggy cargos and flat brim hats. I started dressing myself when I was two years old. My mom was like, “I guess she dresses as a boy now.” My parents totally let me do whatever I wanted, which was really nice. I think now more than ever, I’m starting to know what I really like; me and a couple of my skater friends are starting our own brand and I’m working on some pants. Designing the shoe really opened my eyes; I hope to get into [fashion] more because I really realized I like it, I could do this, and it feels natural.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
