How to Feel Alive During Footwear's Exquisite Corpse Era
It’s important to be your own bellwether.
I knew something was going on when I looked at my shoe rotation and realized I suddenly owned three different pairs of all-black sneakers, and they were all I wanted to wear.
This was unusual because, until a few months ago, I had never owned a pair of all-black sneakers. They always seemed far too utilitarian, like shoes for a dishwasher or an E.R. nurse — people likely to spill marinara or human blood on their feet. And I never liked the way that all-black shoes seem to leave your feet in shadow.
Then, go figure, Justin Saunders and the wizards of the subtle color palette over at JJJJound were able to change my mind. First, I got a pair of the black ASICS GT-2160s that they released at the end of last year. Then a pair of the black leather GORE-TEX New Balance 2002r that followed in December. And, then, Haven released a pair of all-black ASICS Gel-Nimbus and I needed those, too. But I don’t always wear sneakers, so I went to Evan Kinori and grabbed a pair of suede black-on-black Tricker’s boots that are like English countryside Timbs. By that point, the all-black thing really had a hold on me and, while I was in Europe for work the other week, I picked up a pair of murdered-out Mephisto Cruisers.
My shoe rack looks like a funeral procession. But I’ve never felt so alive!
Why? As I do when faced with life’s big questions, I went to the Instagram Explore page in search of answers. There I found a truly diabolical assortment of sneakers and shoes. A real end-of-ideas assortment of mutant footwear. I thought I might identify a trend and determine whether I was merely falling in line, or tastefully blazing my own trail. The answer is apparently both and neither.
Shoes are in the midst of an identity crisis. And it’s glorious to behold. There’s never been as much experimentation with shapes and styles as there is right now. We’ve entered the exquisite corpse era of shoe design, where each part of a shoe seems like it was designed separately from the rest. Never before have there been so many options for running shoes that are also ballet flats that are also mules. But we’re also in a golden age for tasteful shoes, thanks to the mainstreamization of all kinds of loafers and slippers. Soft and supple rich guy shoes can be had by anyone now — you no longer have to buy them from a septuagenarian in a carpeted shoe shoppe.
But none of this explains why I’m currently maintaining a mortician's shoe rotation.
What's clear is that there is a symbiotic relationship between clothes and shoes. When clothes are wild, shoes are normal. This is how we wound up with Sambas and penny loafers everywhere. When clothes are normal, shoes get weird. If only things actually happened according to such binary logic.
Fashion is in a prolonged unsettled period. None of the bold new ideas we've been sold over the last decade or so have held up. Luxury fashion wasn't able to hold our attention longer than the creative directors were able to hold their jobs. The logos we bought five years ago have all been redesigned — serifs came and went and returned — never mind the fact that no one wants to wear them at all anymore.
Meanwhile, a new thing has emerged, something that has been foreign to much of the fashion industry: good clothes. After years of heavy-handed creative direction, nothing is cooler and more desirable right now than a shirt or a pair of pants that is entirely considered, from the fabric to the fit to the stitching to the branding, nothing extraneous and a price that reflects actual perceived value.
But the profusion of unusual shoes I'm seeing tells a different story. Perhaps sneaker-loafers are the perfect footwear for meeting fashion's new era of aggressively wearable clothes, good clothes. What I'm noticing is that while there is increasingly less appetite for newness in fashion, there’s a growing demand for footwear to do the work of exuberant self-expression. And brands are coming around to the idea of experimenting with shoes in new ways. Balenciaga put jumbo sneakers on the map — a trend that spread far and wide rapidly, and continues — and now makes shoes that are hardly there at all. New Balance absolutely dominated the cool-guy sneaker scene, then upped the stakes by doing the one thing it doesn't do: making a loafer. adidas and PUMA seem to have rekindled their historic rivalry and are currently neck and neck in the race to make the most aerodynamic sneakers on the market. Every day I see five different new shoes that look exactly like that one Dries sneaker, which itself looks like the Diesel sneakers that were so popular in the early aughts premium denim era. Margiela has Tabified everything and now I'm actually sick of seeing one of the coolest and most unusual shoes ever made.
Meanwhile, two of the hottest brands on the planet for completely different reasons, Bode and Corteiz, are both releasing all-black Nikes this month.
The chaos happening with shoes right now is a lot like what was happening with fashion seven years ago. Every idea was on the table all at once. Taste was less important than experimentation and discovery. A lot of people were pulling on wide-leg pants for the first time! Now they buy them at COS. What a world.
But there's something very cool and satisfying about those moments of sartorial dissonance. It’s a kind of comfortable discomfort. That's where I'm at with my all-black shoe rotation. For someone else it may be sneaker-loafer-mules. Or ballerina running shoes. It's all the same. No pair of pants can do what shoes are doing right now. That will change soon. What's interesting is which ideas will stick around, and which ideas will pass through the sieve. Then the cycle starts over again.
