CHUNKY BOOTS
Fall’s new foot silhouette is clunky, chunky and tough.
Say goodbye to barelythere strappy sandals. Fall’s footwear is functional, clunky and tough.
When I was growing up, one of the most confounding schoolyard taunts I was ever subjected to was “Your mom wears army boots.” In the early 2000s, when I came of age, “Your momma” jokes were par for the course, but army boots? The joke didn’t Quite land. Was it a veiled homophobic insult suggesting that my mother was a butch lesbian? Or was it simply a dig at anyone who deigned to wear practical yet sturdy footwear? I couldn’t muster the outrage to be offended.
As it turns out, I was only a few short years away from becoming a devoted wearer of army boots myself. After shipping off to university to do an extremely hippie major in environmental studies, I attempted to distinguish myself as the campus eccentric by sporting a rotating wardrobe of thrift-store Dr. Martens that were at least a size too big. I’ve since graduated to coveting Prada’s elevated version of Blundstones and lug-tread Chelsea boots from Church’s, but the impulse remains the same: 10 years on, I would still pick a chunky boot over any other type of footwear.
This fall, I won’t be the only person suiting up in boots that look like they could survive a nuclear blast. Footwear styles that likely haven’t been seen outside of a goth club since 1986 are gunning to become the staple shoes of the season. Thick lug-tread soles found their way onto the Fall 2019 runways at Stella McCartney, Christopher Kane and Collina Strada. Prada debuted chunked-up creeper soles that resembled teeth, while sister label Miu Miu punked up its signature Little Miss Muffet aesthetic with a galumphing combination of space boots and souped-up combat boots. At Acne, boot soles splayed out as if they were melting on hot pavement, and the shoes at Alexander McQueen and Maison Margiela resembled the broad beak of a duck-billed platypus. Daniel Lee’s debut collection for Bottega Veneta featured boots so heavy they looked like they could double as exercise weights. The clear directive for fall is: The more burdensome the better.
There is something distinctly apocalyptic about clunky boots. Fictional wearers include Lisbeth Salander of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Angelina Jolie’s character in Hackers—both ne’er-do-wells fighting variegated forces of evil. The chunkiness serves as an injunction to let go of prissiness and embrace pure functionality. Unwieldy footwear telegraphs an illusion of forcefulness with little effort from the wearers themselves.
Tough and bulbous rubber soles suggest shoes that never break down or need to be replaced. Boots with cumbersome enough soles could theoretically be the last pair a person needs to buy in their life, affording them the freedom to live out the rest of their days in towering soles that never quite wear down. For some, the thought of owning a single pair of shoes might seem grim, but perhaps it doesn’t have to be. We could all use a reminder to live with less—even if that reminder comes in the form of a boot that looks like the final stop in the Pokémon evolution of a Balenciaga Triple S.
I still haven’t quite figured out what “Your mom wears army boots” actually means. Urban Dictionary suggests that the expression hails from WWII, when sex workers followed army troops, which means this might be akin to calling one’s mother a hooker. But I don’t quite buy that. Maybe it doesn’t matter that I fail to grasp the connotations of this vintage insult. All I know is that I plan on wearing army boots for the foreseeable future, and all moms are more than welcome to join me.