Season of peak sneaker silliness
Every brand has to have a pair in its footwear arsenal – crazier, artier, even uglier than the rest
WAY back in the wild days of fashion, in January 2014, Karl Lagerfeld held a couture show set in a fictional Cambon Club (like the Cotton Club, but not), with a full orchestra and grand, sweeping staircase, down which his models tripped in gossamer, bejewelled creations, each one complete with its very own custom sneakers.
Sixty-four different sneakers, with approximately 30 hours of handwork in each, courtesy of the couture shoemaker Massaro.
Designers had flirted with sneakers before, including Yohji Yamamoto and Rick Owens, but because this was Lagerfeld, who does nothing halfway, and because this was couture – the fanciest, most elitist kind of fashion – the choice was taken as a major cultural signifier.
As opposed to, say, a shoe.
It was hailed as a breakthrough. Comfort for all! A small step forward for footwear, a huge step forward for womankind!
Oh, how we eat our words. Four and a half years later, the fashion sneaker phenomenon has reached the point of absurdity.
As marketing executives the style world have become convinced that every single brand has to have a sneaker in its footwear arsenal, and the pressure is on to up the ante with each new design – to make it crazier! and bigger! and artier! (and, sometimes, uglier) – the form has begun to flirt with being a parody of itself. During the recent runway shows, there were sneakers at Versace: on a chain link rubber sole, either boatlike in size or reduced to Velcro sandal straps, like a cross between Chacos and a rapper necklace.
Sneakers at Cavalli: giant, silver, with spaceship bottoms. Valentino made sneakers: nurselike, with detachable feathers.
So did Coach (metallic, with a loafer fringe), Tory Burch (canvas, with contrast laces and soles) and Escada, for its New York runway debut: candy-coloured high-tops with quilted hearts on the ankle, seemingly sourced from a pick ‘n’ mix shop.
And it didn’t stop there. Gherardo Felloni, Roger Vivier’s new creative director, introduced the Viv’ Run, a shoe not remotely made for running (as even he admitted), in multiple colours with a giant signature diamanté buckle and inbuilt heel, so the shoe is actually a 7cm semiwedge. Then Jimmy Choo unveiled the Diamond sneaker, with the “silhouette of a vintage racing shoe, superimposed into a Diamondsoled footprint” that had been created using a special plastic mould that encloses the actual sole, all of it adorned with Swarovski crystals.
Some of these shoes are great. But many of them, the ones most often referred to as dad shoes, really look more like Frankenstein monsters of the foot, cobbled together from references and peer pressure, unwieldy and aggressively clumpy. They don’t free the wearer to take flight. They weigh her down.
And they cost an awful lot – $580 (R8281) for Gucci; $895 for Balenciaga’s Triple S; $1090 for Louis Vuitton’s Archlight, all among the best sellers of the sector – while doing so.
So while Rati Levesque, the chief merchant of luxury resale site TheRealReal.com, said that women’s fashion sneaker sales were up 35% year on year, and while Beth Goldstein, the fashion footwear analyst for the NPD Group, said that designer sneakers were the
No1 growth area in the entire footwear space for men and women, it’s hard not to wonder: Who’s really the sucker here?
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