Jordan Legacy 312 Low review

Even if you're not a big fan of Jordan or his shoes, you should definitely get your hands on the Legacy 312 if you're looking for:

• A combination of the boldest and most iconic features of 3 Jordan shoes.
• A shoe that you can wear quite frequently thanks to its durable materials and easy-to-clean upper.
• A stylish compliment magnet to walk around town comfortably (2 Air-Sole units).

Before you start reading this review, there's something we want to say (and that we'll be saying again throughout the hereinbelow analysis). Here, in RunRepeat, we firmly believe there's a shoe for every occasion. Sometimes you might have more than one model, but it's important to pay attention to each category and use each pair for its intended purpose.

In order to make things easier for you, we wear-tested the Jordan Legacy 312 Low playing basketball and walking around town. So we can confidently tell you this shoe feels like it's designed to be casually worn, grabbing a drink with friends or going out for a stroll. If you want to play ball, we suggest you have a look at our basketball shoes catalogue.

If you're a "strap hater", yet you want a shoe with a similar vibe and a basketball soul, the Nike Dunk Low might be exactly what you need. It also has extra eyelets for the heel support! Nevertheless, if you're looking for the Legacy 312's twin (minus the strap) you'll definitely fall in love with the Air Jordan 1, as its design is highly featured on the Legacy 312.

We grabbed our durometer to check this shoe's stack height. Starting at the heel, it marked 30.0 mm, which is just average.

When we cut the shoe in half, as it's needed to perform tests like this one, we saw the midsole has an Air-Sole unit, which focuses on enhancing cushioning and, consequently, comfort.

As you can see in the picture, the Legacy 312's Air-Sole unit is also visible from the outsole. And we really loved that detail!

We played basketball with this shoe, so we can tell you that it's not the best model to enjoy some hoops. It can survive a game or two, and yeah, we're saying survive. Its cushioning felt great to walk around town, but we'd prefer some extra features to help us improve our performance on the court.

The forefoot stack follows pretty much the same path, as its height is also average.

At 20.0 mm, our calliper indicated there was nothing out of the norm here. Nevertheless, finding an encapsulated Air-Sole unit in the forefoot was not only a pleasing surprise for us, but also a way of reassuring how important it is that here, in RunRepeat, we cut every shoe in half.

You can easily spot the Air-Sole unit in the heel, but there's no way you can see the one in the forefoot from outside just by looking at the sole. You gotta cut it! This cushioning detail made the whole shoe even more comfortable, and we loved it.

After measuring the heel and the forefoot stacks, we found out this shoe has a drop of 10.0 mm.

It's just a regular drop, we didn't feel any different when walking around with this model around town. Overall, we found it quite comfortable!

Remember we were talking about how important it is to cut a shoe open to fully understand it? Well, here we have one of the most clear examples. To measure the midsole softness, we need direct access to the material. So, chop-chop time!

At 33.0 HA, the Legacy 312 Low's midsole is slightly less soft than average. Just not to the point where our feet would actually feel a big change or anything! Walking around town and going up and down the court was still pretty comfortable for us.

At 3.7 mm, our calliper indicated this Jordan's insole is thinner than average.

The best part here (and please let us go for a quick and harmless spoiler) is that this shoe's insole is removable! We'll talk more about it later on.

Our calliper returned 100.9 mm when we measured the Legacy 312's toebox width at the widest part.

Even though this result is higher than average, which means this Jordan is slightly wider in the measured area, we still cannot recommend it for people with wide feet.

If we had only measured the toebox width at the widest part, it would have been confusing for the readers to see it's wider than average, and then realise we're saying that people with big toes might find this shoe uncomfortable.

That's why we grab our calliper and take a second measurement at the big toe. With 71.3 mm, this model gets progressively narrower, so we believe people with wide feet will feel pretty cramped.

Now that we're having a look at the toebox, let's talk about the oh-so-controversial strap (which was taken from the Air Alpha Force). When we wore this shoe out some people complimented us, but we also found out some sneakerheads were actually... cutting the strap? Yeah, wow! They'd just grab a razor and go for a clean cut in the base!

That's totally up to you, though. As we always say, the best style is the one that you feel comfortable with!

Before we start talking about our experience during our wear tests, we're going to let you see a very representative video on why we would avoid playing ball with the Legacy 312:

Exactly, wobbly ankles! According to our experience, this model doesn't have the best ankle support around. Despite having a rigid structure, which usually adds extra points to the overall stability, we did miss some extra supportive features around to play basketball comfortably. Check this video and try to pay close attention to our heel and the wide space in the shoe opening.

If you look at the picture below, you can see there's quite some space between the top eyelet and the heel. We believe the shoe would need a snugger structure, as well as maybe one more eyelet closer to the ankle itself.

That would definitely improve the shoe's overall stability. But this is just one of the many details we believe hoopers would enjoy!

When we walked all the way to the outdoor court wearing this shoe, we realised how hard it was for our forefoot to bend happily and peacefully. This model's stiff structure, inherited from the AJ 1, didn't flex along our moves when we were playing. As expected, this meant the Legacy 312 would require a break-in period.

But we wanted to know more, so we took this model to the lab and performed our torsional rigidity test. And then... we understood it all.

It just wouldn't give in! Our fingers had such a hard time that we didn't have a choice but to give it a 5/5 in our torsional rigidity test. What a brick!

Its overall rigid structure gave in a little bit at the heel, as it wasn't like a brick wall that we were trying to push.

The back of this area did its best to stay still, but it was the side walls the ones that gave in softly. Consequently, we've given this shoe a 3/5 in our heel counter stiffness test.

Let us explain why we believe this is positive and negative at the same time. First, on the bright side, this shoe's heel didn't hurt our Achilles tendon, which we really appreciated. Nevertheless, the lack of support on the sides of this ankle's surrounding structure makes us believe even more strongly in the fact that hooping in this might not be the best idea.

We mean, yeah, you can play ball in any shoe, that's for sure. Even flip-flops! But would we advise you to do it? Do we believe it's the best choice? No. Absolutely not.

In RunRepeat, we believe there's a shoe for every situation. That's why we can only recommend you to have a look at our basketball shoes if you wanna take this sport a little bit more seriously.

Our calliper opened up until 110.8 mm when we measured this shoe's midsole width in the forefoot.

We really like when shoes have a base on the wider side, as it means some extra stability!

The heel follows the same example. At 87.6 mm, this time is 5% wider than average.

It might not sound like much when you just read a mere 5%, but trust us, the difference is mm is wild! We noticed it during our wear tests walking around town, as our heels had plenty of space to enjoy our short trips.

Getting back to this shoe's immovable structure, our flex test showed 45.6N of force were needed to bend this Jordan all the way up to 90 degrees.

Our feet realised that this shoe's weight and lack of flexibility made it harder for us to have a smooth stride, let alone hoop! After all, the Legacy 312 Low is a crazy 47% stiffer than average.

We also didn't really like the way the shoe bent in the ball of the foot. And what's worse: this translated into some wrinkles later on!

This shoe felt pretty heavy on our feet! We didn't think much of it at the beginning of our walks around town and when we stopped for some quick hoops, but... it got progressively worse.

We could feel our feet were getting more and more tired, and it was not after a long time either, though!

We went back to our lab trying not to drag our feet, and when we put this shoe on our scale we understood everything pretty clearly. At 16.35 oz/463.5g, this shoe is way heavier than average!

If you're looking for some comfy and lightweight shoes to explore the city, we believe you should check out our walking shoes!

As soon as we unboxed this shoe, we realised summer was not its favourite season. Just by looking at its structure, we could already tell it was gonna hate our breathability test.

But hey, we're not here to discuss hypotheses, we're here to see the truth! It's time to smoke things up.

We waited, and waited, and... waited some more. But nothing! The Legacy 312 Low wouldn't let a single bit of smoke go through its rough materials. That's what a 1/5 in breathability looks like! If the New Balance 57/40 (right side of the video) could talk, it would totally agree with us. It got a 4/5 in this same test, so it's an expert on the matter!

We cut the shoe in half and put it right in front of our light. After seeing that the smoke couldn't get through, we were wondering if at least a little bit of light would be able to make its way through the rugged upper material. But nope! Look at that!

Hey, hey. Even though we believed this Jordan wouldn't be the most breathable out there, we did see what looked like holes in its toebox. What's up with that?

We asked our microscope, and it told us that they were not actually holes!

It's easier to see in this close-up picture, where we can clearly spot an underlayer at the end of our supposed "holes".

There's a lot to talk about here, so let's get down to business!

To see if a shoe's materials are real/authentic or fake/synthetic, we grab our butane torch and leather scratch awl and start the party. As the Legacy 312 Low has different sections, we performed this same test three times.

This white middle panel is a great example of what fake leather looks like. As you can see, it burned up with a big flame!

Despite also being white in this colorway, the toebox proved its authenticity. As you can see, there's no big flame this time, and the material doesn't end up all melted. Genuine leather, that is!

Last but not least, we went for the red overlay. It also showed its authenticity, and 2/3 in genuine materials is not that bad! If you want a Nike shoe with a very similar vibe and made using high-quality materials, we believe you should have a look at the Nike Dunk Low. Just keep in mind its top-notch upper comes with a higher price tag!

Now that we know the toebox materials of the Legacy 312 are genuine, we have high expectations regarding the durability test in this area! So we grabbed our Dremel at 5K RPM, with 3.2N of force, and started drilling.

We were really impressed! Even if we already thought the results would be great, this shoe's toebox acted as if it had never seen our Dremel before.

We don't think that could even be categorised as a scratch, right? It feels like there was a stain there and we scratched a little bit too hard trying to remove it.

The Jordan Legacy 312 Low earned a solid 5/5 in our toebox durability test. We can clearly see why if we compare the results with the Under Armour Charged Assert 10, which ended up with a messy 1/5.

The heel padding is usually the most vulnerable part of a shoe, and we know that well! After the great outcome of our first durability test, we couldn't wait to see what the Legacy 312 had in store for us next.

Not bad, not bad! We were positively surprised once again. When we put the tool on the side, we couldn't help but nod; so we gave this model a great 4/5 in our heel padding durability test.

As you can see, it's quite hard to see the damage. Consequently, this didn't have a negative effect on the shoe's integrity.

If you want to see what ruined heel padding looks like, check the Under Armour Charged Assert 9's result in this same test. It scored a sad 1/5, as it got completely destroyed!

To measure the hardness of an outsole, we use a tool called durometer. At 86.1 HC, this shoe showed an average result, which usually means it'll offer a healthy mix of durability and grip!

We'll keep learning about the outsole in the next sections, stay tuned!

We grabbed our Dremel one last time to finish with the durability tests. Turning our shoe upside down, it was time for its outsole to bring it all out. Let's go!

At 10K RPM, with 3.2N of force, and during 22 seconds, our tool did its best to damage the Legacy 312's outsole. We measured the depth of the dent once we had finished, and our gauge marked 1.2 mm, which is a bit more than average.

We thought the material would be slightly more resistant, but it's not like you can't use this shoe every day or it'll wear out in two seconds, don't worry!

So far, we know this shoe's outsole is pretty much as hard as the average, yet it's a little bit less durable. We were surprised to see our calliper marked 3.9 mm when we measured its thickness, as this means it's a fair 30% thinner than average.

So, in our opinion, even though this shoe might bring you way too many bball vibes and memories, it might be better not to use it to play streetball regularly! If that's what you're looking for, we believe you should have a look at our outdoor basketball catalogue.

We knew the basketball soul of this shoe wouldn't disappoint regarding traction, and it didn't!

During our wear tests, we found its outsole (which was heavily inspired by the Alpha Force's) pretty grippy on urban surfaces. We didn't face any problems, which made us walk around with confidence.

As you can see in the picture, the outsole is divided into different sections and has a textured pattern all over it. There's also a huge pivot point in red (in this colorway) surrounded by rounded shapes, just like the expansion of a wave in the water. We found this last detail great for basketball, and even though we wouldn't hoop wearing this shoe (there are many other models way more suitable), pivot points are always welcome in ball moves. Even if you don't specifically play centre!

This Jordan showed nice traction walking around town and on the court. In other words: it bit on pretty much any kind of surface, and we can confidently say its grip was definitely not the reason why we decided not to hoop in it!

The Jordan Legacy 312 doesn't have any reflective elements. Be careful if you go for a walk at night and there are no lights around!

This shoe's tongue is as padded as the average at 9.3 mm.

No lace bite, no hotspots, no uncomfortableness! It felt pretty good, no complaints here!

Most likely in order to reduce the shoe's overall weight (or so we believe), the brand decided to go for a non-gusseted tongue on the Legacy 312 Low.

We actually appreciated this design choice, as it helped us put this shoe on and off way more easily. Nevertheless, it might be one more reason why a couple of casual hoops are all we'd use this model for regarding basketball.

You see, despite its padded interiors and non-stretchy materials, during our wear tests we felt we needed some extra support. Despite its rigid structure, the wide opening of this Jordan made us feel like our heels would have appreciated a snugger fit to play basketball confidently.

The Legacy 312 Low features a pull-tab. It follows the design of the Jordan 3, but the structure goes all the way up, so we could grab it when we wanted to put this shoe on.

We really liked how the brand added "AIR" under the Jumpman logo. Some extra points in style once again!

We had already hinted at this before, but we're very happy to mention once again that this Jordan has a removable insole.

As you see, it's plain and simple, yet it does its job pretty well! The best part is that if you need some extra arch support (which might be a thing in this shoe), for example, you can always use your own orthotics.