Last week, I received an email from Opening Ceremony’s newsletter, announcing that their collaboration with a lifestyle sport sandal brand was in stores after having sold out online. The photo showed two geometrically painted legs wearing the OC/Teva collabo, two lightweight, waterproof-suede sandals in shades of black and bubblegum pink. For a moment—just a moment—I thought, “I would wear those.”
No. I know. It’s wrong.
But for the past few years, we have had the comfort-shoe trend pushed upon us by designers and manufacturers alike, starting with the “cool Birkenstocks” trend that I attribute to Chloe Sevigny (per a New York Times piece in 2011, which predated the trend among fashion editors by about a year) and which, in March, reached peak cool Birkenstock in the form of a New Yorker profile. Recently, a smart piece by Alice Newell-Hanson in i-D noted the turn toward comfort shoes as a response to the tottering stiletto, and wrote that comfort shoes “might distort familiar proportions to the point of obscurity, the practical ugly shoe gives us something we at least partly recognize. It is uncanny, in the Freudian sense.”
With the Teva, I find the uncanniness most acute. Growing up in Wyoming in the late ‘90s, the Teva was the functional sandal most everyone wore, particularly because it was a time when everyone in Wyoming and Colorado seemed to be newly invested in rock-climbing. Even typing that just made me laugh—it was one of my high school boyfriend’s favorite pastimes, and it very well could have been the hobby that drove us apart. But even at a young age, I remember feeling visually repulsed by their aesthetics. The way the strap, a water-resistant mix of cloth and velcro and rubber, hit just at the base of the toes, giving the illusion of elongating them. The way the minimal design perfectly accompanied those baggy khaki shorts and bandana everyone wore “for hiking purposes,” that made them look like refugees from a Dave Matthews concert. The overarching aesthetic was outdoorsy, functional, and absolutely hideous. Cannily, I clung to my baby-doll t-shirts and enormous skater jeans with a profound sense of superiority, as my school peers paired their Tevas with socks.