Nigel Sylvester has spent years turning BMX into a first-person language. Through his “GO” series, the New York rider took cameras onto bikes, through streets, cities and unfamiliar places, giving viewers a direct view of the speed, risk and improvisation that define his world. His latest project, “Brick After Brick”, continues that story from a different angle, looking at the career, culture and ideas that have made Sylvester one of BMX’s most recognisable figures.
His rise has also taken him far beyond the traditional boundaries of the sport. Sylvester has become a familiar presence in fashion and streetwear circles, where his approach to riding, clothing and visual storytelling has created its own vocabulary. That trajectory eventually brought him to Jordan Brand, making him the first BMX athlete to collaborate with the label in 2018.
The partnership began with the Air Jordan I, reworked through Sylvester’s BMX perspective. Distressed surfaces and details associated with bike culture gave the familiar silhouette a different context, while keeping its original character intact. Since then, Sylvester has returned to several of Jordan’s most established models, including the Air Jordan I and Air Jordan IV, turning each into another piece of the conversation between BMX, sneakers and street culture.
Speaking to Men’s Journal, Sylvester described the process as something he approaches with a considerable sense of responsibility. The Jordan I and IV carry decades of cultural history, and he sees every collaboration as an opportunity to add something of his own without ignoring what those shoes already mean to people. His first Jordan project, in particular, was approached with the ambition to make the result feel unmistakably connected to his identity rather than simply place a BMX reference onto an existing design.
That distinction has become central to his work with the brand. Sylvester’s collaborations are built around his own experiences — the places he has ridden, the objects he grew up around and the visual marks accumulated through years on a bike. The shoes become a physical record of that history, carrying traces of BMX into silhouettes that were originally created within basketball culture.
For Sylvester, that connection is also part of Michael Jordan’s wider influence. He has spoken about Jordan’s impact extending well beyond basketball, reaching athletes and communities that found their own meaning in what the player represented. In that sense, Sylvester sees his work with the brand as part of a much larger cultural movement that began with Jordan’s ability to move between sport, fashion and everyday life.
That connection is personal, too. Sylvester grew up wearing Jordan and watching the brand develop into something that existed far beyond the basketball court. Becoming one of its collaborators therefore carries a particular weight: he gets to place fragments of his own childhood, career and setbacks into products that once belonged to his own frame of reference as a fan.
The response to the collaborations has reinforced that idea. Sylvester has noted that much of the reaction has centred on the feelings attached to the shoes as much as their physical design. For his audience, the projects can carry memories of BMX, childhood, street culture and the particular freedom associated with moving through a city on two wheels.
“Brick After Brick” arrives within that larger story. Sylvester’s career has never stayed neatly inside BMX, and the documentary reflects a trajectory in which riding became the starting point for something considerably wider: filmmaking, design, fashion and a growing influence over how the sport is seen from outside its traditional boundaries.
The bike remains at the centre of it all. Everything else has grown outward from there.
Follow Nigel Sylvester on: Youtube / Instagram
Photos (c) courtesy of Nigel Sylvester
