The Free-Wheeling Gaze: Footnotes
by Alice Goldfarb Marquis
Early in 1927, Alfred Barr held up an egg before his Wellesley students in the first-ever college class on contemporary art and asked, "How does that impress you?" The founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art went on to exhibit automobiles, advertisements, kitchen ware, furniture, and an Italian immigrant's brightly painted shoeshine stand. This last cost him his job as MOMA director in 1943, but it did not hamper his free-wheeling gaze, a broad searchlight focused on the esthetics of all things visual.
In that spirit, I'd like to challenge you now ... "How does this impress you?" (NoName high top sneaker, c. 1994, made in China, acquired in Paris, silver synthetic upper, rubber sole.) This is just one of thousands of sophisticated offspring of the humble sneaker, a canvas and rubber shoe first produced in 1917. This inexpensive foot-covering may well be the first article of fashionable clothing that derives its status from being comfortable and useful. Its cunning, complex construction mirrors this century's preoccupation with technology and science, and, closer to our time, our obsession with health and sport.
By contrast, many fashionable items of the past proclaimed the wearer's status by being intricately decorated, hampering the wearer's movements and thereby signalling that this person did no physical labor. The starched ruff, the bustle, the hoopskirt, and the brocaded frock coat come to mind. The fleet- footed gods of Greeks and Romans -- along with most citizens --- had to make their way across wintry agorae and fora in sandals precariously laced onto bare feet. Medieval folk went largely barefoot. Even royals could not count on fleece-lined Gore-tex sneakers to get them through mud and slush; they wore dainty custom-made footcoverings unlikely to survive a single London drizzle.
One paradox of athletic shoes is that they provide maximum comfort in an era when walking or running are no longer central to survival, but rather recreations deemed healthful for the sedentary workers most of us have become. In the gym and along the road, we simulate the strenuous physical labor our ancestors considered a normal part of each day.
In our culture, sneakers dwelled anonymously -- save the occasional orthopedist's warning that they could ruin children's feet -- until the 1980s. Then they erupted into public consciousness with a luxuriance, a speed, and, yes, hype seldom seen in the garment world. A certain fanfare was sounded in mid-1979, when The New York Times reported that sneakers were replacing loafers as the casual shoe of choice. So primitive were the statistics that sales went untracked and the chairman of the athletic shoe committee of the Sporting Goods Manufacturers' Association admitted that there was no clear definition of an athletic shoe. An obscure maker of running shoes in Beaverton, Oregon had no trouble defining its product, having doubled its sales, in a single year, to 11 million pairs worth $150 million.
Yes, that's spelled N-I-K-E; you know, the ones with the swoosh. Nike defined the entire industry as it came to dominate the burgeoning market over the next twenty years. As athletic shoes devoured nearly 40% of all shoe sales in America, dozens of players entered the competitive scrimmage. Meanwhile, newspapers and magazines covered this footwear phenomenon from a multitude of angles: business, health, sports, opinion, politics, and fashion. Indeed, the sneaker has attracted more diverse media coverage than any other item of clothing, deservedly so, since it is ubiquitous. In 1993, the average European owned two pairs, the average American, four pairs -- and the average American boy twelve pairs. More than half of American sneaker buyers were boys under 18. The literature is overloaded with data about the rise and decline of the market (extremely volatile), the footwear endorsements of famous athletes and teams (purchased by shoe companies for millions), the squabbles over patented designs (lucrative for attorneys), the technology for improved performance (largely hype), the complexity of cushioning the human foot (podiatrists rampant), the deplorable conditions in Asian sneaker factories (finger-pointing and hand-wringing) and the competition to capture a piece of this $15 billion market (frenetic).
These issues and many others impact the design of sneakers as objects of fashion and of art, the focus of this paper, but they cannot be covered today. For those interested in these areas, an extended bibliography, including pertinent web sites, follows this text.
The fashionable sneaker has a dramatically short history, dating from a New York transit strike in 1980 that induced many well-dressed women (and some men) to reach for their Reeboks. But its trajectory onto the fashionable foot followed a common, uniquely American pattern. Unlike Europe, where fashion tends to trickle down from costly haute couture to sleazy knockoffs, American fashions tend to bubble up ... consider cowboy boots, jeans, T-shirts - - and sneakers.
Nike's founder and president, Phil Knight, strenuously dismisses allegations of fashion, but his creative director, Tinker Hatfield, has compared the aura of his chefs d'oeuvre to that of the New York Public Library: "You understand it's a civic building because they have designed romantic imagery into it." Hatfield, a trained architect, sees the work of his 300 designers as a "unique and uniquely American contribution to contemporary design." The line of women's fitness shoes introduced by Nike last Christmas implied performance in its name, Total Body Conditioning, but its centerpiece, the $120 Air Max Mundo, was inspired, according to a company spokesperson, by "the classic architecture of Europe."
If improved performance, as Nike's Knight claims, were the central criterion for sneakers, designs would change relatively slowly. Only a forced draft of fashion, fuelled by intense competition, can account for the scorching pace of stylistic change in sneaker design over the last twenty years. The paradox is that athletes' claims of improved performance resonate with two principal types of consumers: youngsters under 18 seeking fashion status among their peers, and a much larger group of mature adults who entertain the fantasy of performance while strolling in comfortable shoes. The performance claim enhances the fantasy appeal of a new style, but the look of it -- its esthetic appeal -- clinches the sale.
As sneakers oozed increasingly onto the feet of urban executives no less than suburban soccer moms, fashion designers took note. In the fall of 1988, Donna Karan's models strolled down the runway in classic blazers, jump suits, and pants, shod in white sneakers. The New York Times style guru Bernardine Morris declared they "provide the right foundation." Such was the buzz on sneaks that a few months later, Giorgio Armani asserted that "women want to look nice, but what they really want is an elegant sneaker." Even the frumpish Christian Science Monitor found aerobic-soled Ferragamos fetching; a Bloomingdale's buyer was aghast at a mink-clad matron in sneakers, but Nike and Reebok were working on a fashionable comfort shoe.
By 1993, the fashion world was in full cry after this grail, launching high- heeled hightops ($34 at Bloomingdale's), open toe silver mules with laces and a rubber tread (Gaultier, $115 at Barney's), and triple-thick soles ($68 from Ecco). But what clinched the sneaker's arrival in fashion's fickle favor was news from France that assistants and designers in the great couture houses were sporting sneaks; Vogue's fashion director had been seen in the front row of the Pierre Balmain show flaunting her clunky ankle-high running shoes (Chanel, $600, sold out). Soon came a breathless report that French-made sneakers inelegantly named Chippies, were marching through Paris in silver leather, red patent and black patent trimmed with white reflective material ($150). Bloomingdale's vice president for fashion direction predicted they would race to the fashion summit in the summer of 1994; he was wearing a silver pair himself: "They're festive and fun."
In 1996, a transit strike forced Frenchwomen into sneakers, but, unlike their New York sisters, they quickly abandoned such pedestrian footwear when the buses and Metro ran again. Not for long; in 1998, French ladies were reported in love with a sneaker called Quick, a gold, black, white, or natural leather number ($525 at Hermes). And barely into 1999 came the latest on "fashionable shoes designed to be comfortable." They featured "molded bottoms of rubberized synthetic materials that conform to the contours of the foot with uppers of leather or fabric." Sounds suspiciously like a sneaker. Donna Karan, who had so recently dressed her models in Keds (and whose logo intrudes egregiously upon two pairs of my favorite sneakers), had developed a $295 skimmer. Prada offered a scuba bootie for $320, and Chanel weighed in with a sporty lug-soled sandal for $395.
If only for their steepening price tags and their designer cachet, sneakers have clearly become more than a comfortable way to get your feet from here to there. For headline writers, they are a rich source of puns: "Best Feet Forward," "Flying the Swoosh and Stripes," "Sneaking Back." Such text implies that nothing serious follows, that this is just a light take on a frivolous subject. But the amount of coverage under such a variety of departments indicates that sneakers play a conspicuous role in contemporary culture. Few categories of things are so ubiquitous. Marcel Duchamp taught us that everyday objects can be art. Like Alfred Barr's egg, athletic shoes cry out for esthetic contemplation.
In that light, one is struck by the many ways the world of sneakers resembles that of fine art. Just like paintings or sculptures, sneakers have their style cycles and cues for dating them, although the flames of competition and the faddishness of youthful consumers accelerate cyclical changes into a span of just a few years. Nevertheless, sneakers seem to blossom from simple prototypes like Keds [let's call them Archaic], to more elaborate, refined models [Classical?], and then into rampant excess [Hellenistic?]. When complexity has nowhere else to go -- and when sales are faltering -- a great cry in the industry urges a return to basics. Which sets off another cycle, again moving from simplicity to complexity, although at another level. Dare we call it Proto- Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Mannerist?
Like works of high art, sneakers play their role as status symbols, objects to be collected and displayed. In 1988,the Wall Street Journal reported on a New Yorker who harbored 150 pairs in his two-bedroom Harlem apartment. Among them were red and black Nike Airwalkers for all-night dancing, chartreuse and gold Adidas with purple stripes for "impressing the ladies," black and sky-blue Evolvos for Saturdays in the park, and ink-blue Nikes for "hanging out." In 1994, Japanese teen-agers were paying $945 for ten-year-old Air Jordans. Just two years later came a poignant echo of the legend among art connoisseurs of finding a Rembrandt in a dotty old lady's attic: vendors at the Rose Bowl flea market were reported selling sneakers they had winkled out of friends' and family's closets, thrift shops, and garage sales for as much as $1,500. Last year, the Wall Street Journal described a "sneaker pimp" who sells old shoes to collectors, mostly Japanese, through a Seattle antique store. Like any other middleman, whether he peddles flesh on Hollywood Boulevard or Fauves on Madison Avenue, the sneaker pimp had a keen sense of the merchandise's value. He knew that a pair of 1985 Nike Dunks, blue and black high tops had sold at an Internet auction for $2,300; that metallic lizard-print Adidases made in France have gone for $5,000.
In the fine art world, an exhibition, if not a museum, soon follows on the heels (forgive me!) of such price inflation. And so it has in the world of sneakers. In 1995, the Los Angeles Times devoted five pages in its Sunday magazine to the saga of a local bookstore clerk who was haunting swap meets and second hand shops, snapping pictures of sneakers to add to his four-inch ring binder of photos and lore. In a storage room at home, he had sixty pairs locked up ... including 20 pairs of outdated Keds he acquired on a foraging expedition to Harlem.
Comes now Houston software engineer Charles L. Perrin, who has been curating a virtual museum on the Web for almost four years. More than 100,000 people have visited the site. "I always liked ... [sneakers] ... and had a number of them," he wrote. "I wanted something to do on a Web site. So I started putting down what I remembered ... Then people started contributing files ... It just snowballed..." A recent printout of the directory for Charlie's Sneaker Pages illustrates the avalanche; it fills 6 1/2 single-spaced sheets. Included are clickable links to fifty types of sneakers, to an exhibition of "pre- historic" sneakers from 1908 to the 1940s, to fifty legendary sneakers from the 1960s to 1997, to scores of illustrated essays on favorite sneakers, to a "Hall of Shame" for the most disappointing sneakers, and many other sole-searching topics. Among freshly updated items is a discussion of the most popular sneaker of all time, an exhibit of the Top Ten Sneakers, and a glossary of sneaker terms.
On a more scholarly level, sneakers are included in an exhibition of 150 modern shoes that opened at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York on January 26. Valerie Steele, its chief curator, identified two sneaker "style tribes," those who cherish advanced technology and those "techno urban warriors" who sally forth in heavy platform-soled brogans unsuitable for any sport but in-your-face flaunting.
The creation of a sneaker involves not only a designer, but also biomechanists, materials scientists, advanced product engineers, and, of course, thousands of underpaid Asians, mostly women. A visual inspection of a moderately technical shoe, like my aerobics Avia, reveals thirty pieces of fabric, leather, and synthetic sewn together in the upper, nine pieces in the lining, and five different materials fused in the sole. The intricate stew of creative and technical specialties involved in sneaker production resembles the production team of a movie or television program. As with fine art as well as films, the sneaker market itself is keenly studied by researchers, including demographers, social psychologists, economists, and journalists. But only sneakers have attracted professional late-night club-hoppers in search of hipsters riding the next style wave.
Sneakers also resemble all art, whether high or low, whether visual, musical, literary, or dance, whether fine or popular, in the vast array of failures that litter the road to success. Back in 1977, Runner's World rated the Brooks Vantage Number One. Four years later, only Nike was outselling Brooks in the under $50 category. But less than a year after that, Brooks was bankrupt, its Puerto Rico factory auctioned for creditors. Velcro closures arrived in 1985 -- and departed the next year. P.F. (for Posture Foundation) Flyers had been dormant for decades when the owners of this trademark decided in 1988 to revive them; had not Keds tripled its sales to $150 million in just three years? But the P.F. of the late 80s stood for ... Profound Failure. British Knights took Los Angeles by storm in the late 1980s ... until local street gangs called the BKs "Brother Killers" and the shoes disappeared.
Alas, the sneaker world shares with the art world a tendency to use arcane and often loopy verbiage to explain what it is trying to do. Reebok's trend and forecasting director was convinced, in 1992, that flashy soles would sell shoes: "There is an unexpected excitement," she said, "when the upper is mostly white and there is a burst of color on the soles." The designer of the great sensation that year, the Reebok Pump said the blister-like protrusions on the shoe's tongue "play on our natural curiosity about how things work." Even high-minded design gurus are not immune. The author of a four-page article on Reebok's late, unlamented Insta-pump perhaps had good reason to remain anonymous. It is "a product that is closer to a sports tool than to a shoe," he wrote. Its designers were thinking in "structural ... almost architectonic terms."
These are among the many arresting ways that the world of the lowly sneaker parallels the high art world. These similarities argue for seeking diversity in contemplating, appreciating, teaching, and explicating all visual phenomena. After all, if the shoe fits ... but you know the rest.
Alice Goldfarb Marquis is the author of "Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding" , a forthcoming biography of Marcel Duchamp, and the occasional New York Times op-ed. She gave a version of this paper at the College Art Association in Los Angeles, California, on Feb. 11, 1999.