Saw this article in the Times today. What do you think? Are Birkenstocks so uncool that they will become cool again?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/fa...ml?ref=fashion
Even Macho Toes Like to Breathe
If any shoe can be said to suffer from multiple-personality disorder, it is the Birkenstock. Default summer shoe for the dreadlocks and Hacky Sack crowd, this homely little German sandal with the chunky foot bed appeals equally to campus nerds, Lilith Fair types and even Japanese hipsters, the most fanatical of fashion's early adopters.
It was a couple of years back that Birkenstocks began undergoing some kind of transformation. First they started showing up on the guys you see shopping for green-tea ice cream and mochi at the Sunrise Mart in the East Village. Then occupationally chic fellows like David Rees and Ron Anderson, the designers of Ten Thousand Things, the minimalist jewelry shop in the meatpacking district, picked up the cue and started accessorizing their skinny khakis and classic button-down shirts with Birkenstocks. Next, Dean and Dan Caten, the twins who design Dsquared2, riffed outrageously on the Birkenstock in a Milan men's wear show whose theme was glamour camping, or "glamping." And now ... well, now Birkenstocks are everywhere.
"I'm obsessed," said Andrea Linett, the creative director of Lucky, who, despite her own long-standing affection for the sandal (she favors the Arizona, the original ur-hippie two-strap, side-buckle style, in a color called "sand"), repeatedly failed in her efforts to persuade her husband to wear a pair.
"I've been hounding him for years, and he just wouldn't do it," she said. "And the whole time he was torturing his feet wearing boots in summer, with his feet sweating and no arch support."
It was not that her husband, Michael Waring, a fashion photographer, objected to wearing sandals that purportedly improve one's foot health and skeletal alignment. He just didn't want to be caught with his feet encased in a cork-soled advertisement for a wheat-germ-and-Volvo lifestyle.
"But then he caved."
One reason may be the introduction by the company "” founded in 1774 and introduced in the United States in the 1960s by Margot Fraser "” of the Ramses, a masculine version of the Gizeh, a thong style popularized by a posse of American fashion editors. True, the Ramses comes in only manly neutral colors, and so the wearing of patent- or metallic-leather versions is still restricted to men with feet dainty enough to wear a women's size.
"It was never a goal of ours at Birkenstock to be fashionable with capital F," said Shelly Glasgow, the director of product development for Birkenstock USA. "But when we saw pictures of male celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Usher wearing Birkenstock products that we hadn't in any way placed with them, we didn't want to let that go." And thus the company decided to raise the ante on design.
No one need fear the loss of the purely ugly original, however "” the one Ms. Linett of Lucky called a classic, the only acceptable "mandal" and the perfect foot gear with a pair of skinny white jeans.
As Ms. Glasgow explained, "The Arizona is still a best seller."
"I can sell you the shoe we sold you in 1966," she said. "It's exactly the same."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/fa...ml?ref=fashion
Even Macho Toes Like to Breathe
If any shoe can be said to suffer from multiple-personality disorder, it is the Birkenstock. Default summer shoe for the dreadlocks and Hacky Sack crowd, this homely little German sandal with the chunky foot bed appeals equally to campus nerds, Lilith Fair types and even Japanese hipsters, the most fanatical of fashion's early adopters.
It was a couple of years back that Birkenstocks began undergoing some kind of transformation. First they started showing up on the guys you see shopping for green-tea ice cream and mochi at the Sunrise Mart in the East Village. Then occupationally chic fellows like David Rees and Ron Anderson, the designers of Ten Thousand Things, the minimalist jewelry shop in the meatpacking district, picked up the cue and started accessorizing their skinny khakis and classic button-down shirts with Birkenstocks. Next, Dean and Dan Caten, the twins who design Dsquared2, riffed outrageously on the Birkenstock in a Milan men's wear show whose theme was glamour camping, or "glamping." And now ... well, now Birkenstocks are everywhere.
"I'm obsessed," said Andrea Linett, the creative director of Lucky, who, despite her own long-standing affection for the sandal (she favors the Arizona, the original ur-hippie two-strap, side-buckle style, in a color called "sand"), repeatedly failed in her efforts to persuade her husband to wear a pair.
"I've been hounding him for years, and he just wouldn't do it," she said. "And the whole time he was torturing his feet wearing boots in summer, with his feet sweating and no arch support."
It was not that her husband, Michael Waring, a fashion photographer, objected to wearing sandals that purportedly improve one's foot health and skeletal alignment. He just didn't want to be caught with his feet encased in a cork-soled advertisement for a wheat-germ-and-Volvo lifestyle.
"But then he caved."
One reason may be the introduction by the company "” founded in 1774 and introduced in the United States in the 1960s by Margot Fraser "” of the Ramses, a masculine version of the Gizeh, a thong style popularized by a posse of American fashion editors. True, the Ramses comes in only manly neutral colors, and so the wearing of patent- or metallic-leather versions is still restricted to men with feet dainty enough to wear a women's size.
"It was never a goal of ours at Birkenstock to be fashionable with capital F," said Shelly Glasgow, the director of product development for Birkenstock USA. "But when we saw pictures of male celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Usher wearing Birkenstock products that we hadn't in any way placed with them, we didn't want to let that go." And thus the company decided to raise the ante on design.
No one need fear the loss of the purely ugly original, however "” the one Ms. Linett of Lucky called a classic, the only acceptable "mandal" and the perfect foot gear with a pair of skinny white jeans.
As Ms. Glasgow explained, "The Arizona is still a best seller."
"I can sell you the shoe we sold you in 1966," she said. "It's exactly the same."
