The San Francisco-based brand Allbirds makes shoes so soft and flexible that you can bend them almost a hundred and eighty degrees in your hands. When worn, the lightweight rubber soles flare out at the ball of the foot, creating a slightly geriatric silhouette. The “S-curve tread array” carved into the bottom of the sole is supposed to distribute your weight evenly as you walk; the insoles caress your arches and make walking feel like gliding. The merino-wool fabric, in a variety of neutral and pastel shades, is reminiscent of an expensive Fair Isle sweater, except somehow not at all itchy. It is thin enough that you can see the outline of your toes as you walk. The eight lace holes of the original Allbirds “Runners,” embellished with contrast stitching, have a dad-ish quality to them. The only visible branding is a small tab on the back and a cursive, lowercase “allbirds” carved into the heel. The shoes are, for all my attempts to describe them, excessively nondescript. This is perhaps their biggest innovation. Allbirds are so meticulously basic that, when clad in them, your feet almost cease to exist.
For quite a while now, “sensible” footwear has been enjoying a curious vogue. Take the slow reinvigoration of Birkenstocks, or the popular #cloglife tag on Instagram, which features women sporting buttery leather clogs inspired by Dutch farm shoes. Or take the bizarre fact that Crocs has surged to No. 13 on the list of footwear brands that teen-agers desire most. Even high fashion is purposefully cribbing an “ugly” aesthetic from the world of Dr. Scholl’s inserts and podiatry foam; the new thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton “Archlight” sneakers look like something an extraterrestrial might wear to a Jazzercise class. But Allbirds, which are billed as “the world’s most comfortable shoe,” cannot really be categorized as ugly footwear, because the idea behind them is not proud unstylishness but technical perfection; the writer Emily Gould has aptly described her Allbirds as “an algorithm on my feet.” (...)
In their initial wave of popularity, Allbirds became an essential part of the daily uniform of Bay Area tech entrepreneurs. “Everyone’s wearing them,” a startup financier told the Times last August. “Sometimes it is awkward, especially if we’re wearing the same color.” But in the past year Allbirds have travelled outside the clean hallways of Silicon Valley headquarters and tipped into the mainstream. Mila Kunis wears Allbirds. So does Jennifer Garner. So do Park Slope dads and modern dancers and trendy teen-agers and kooky aunts and registered nurses and bartenders and pretty much every overworked, weary thirtysomething you see on the New York subway. Leonardo DiCaprio, an early adopter of eco-innovations, liked his pair so much that he became an investor in August, saying in a statement that the shoes are “crucial for creating a more sustainable future.” In October, the company announced a third round of funding, bringing its total valuation reportedly to $1.4 billion—which makes it a particularly precocious breed of unicorn (by comparison, Warby Parker, the digital-first eyeglasses company, took eight years to reach its current valuation of around $1.75 billion). (...)
I recently watched the fascinating documentary “Generation Wealth,” by the photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who has been chronicling American excess for two decades. Her work portrays the kind of ostentatious materialism—gold chains, stretch limos, marble toilets, super-yachts—that feels like it’s from another era. What’s more prevalent now is a softer, sneakier expression of affluence, the clean, clinical stylings of the technocratic class. Luxury is no longer about wearing so many diamonds that you topple over; it’s about driving the quietest car, living in the most automated home, reducing the amount of friction you have to navigate in the world. Allbirds might be the closest the world of everyday fashion has come to embracing this ideal of optimized efficiency.
by Rachel Syme, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Christie Hemm Klok / NYT / Redux
For quite a while now, “sensible” footwear has been enjoying a curious vogue. Take the slow reinvigoration of Birkenstocks, or the popular #cloglife tag on Instagram, which features women sporting buttery leather clogs inspired by Dutch farm shoes. Or take the bizarre fact that Crocs has surged to No. 13 on the list of footwear brands that teen-agers desire most. Even high fashion is purposefully cribbing an “ugly” aesthetic from the world of Dr. Scholl’s inserts and podiatry foam; the new thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton “Archlight” sneakers look like something an extraterrestrial might wear to a Jazzercise class. But Allbirds, which are billed as “the world’s most comfortable shoe,” cannot really be categorized as ugly footwear, because the idea behind them is not proud unstylishness but technical perfection; the writer Emily Gould has aptly described her Allbirds as “an algorithm on my feet.” (...)In their initial wave of popularity, Allbirds became an essential part of the daily uniform of Bay Area tech entrepreneurs. “Everyone’s wearing them,” a startup financier told the Times last August. “Sometimes it is awkward, especially if we’re wearing the same color.” But in the past year Allbirds have travelled outside the clean hallways of Silicon Valley headquarters and tipped into the mainstream. Mila Kunis wears Allbirds. So does Jennifer Garner. So do Park Slope dads and modern dancers and trendy teen-agers and kooky aunts and registered nurses and bartenders and pretty much every overworked, weary thirtysomething you see on the New York subway. Leonardo DiCaprio, an early adopter of eco-innovations, liked his pair so much that he became an investor in August, saying in a statement that the shoes are “crucial for creating a more sustainable future.” In October, the company announced a third round of funding, bringing its total valuation reportedly to $1.4 billion—which makes it a particularly precocious breed of unicorn (by comparison, Warby Parker, the digital-first eyeglasses company, took eight years to reach its current valuation of around $1.75 billion). (...)
I recently watched the fascinating documentary “Generation Wealth,” by the photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who has been chronicling American excess for two decades. Her work portrays the kind of ostentatious materialism—gold chains, stretch limos, marble toilets, super-yachts—that feels like it’s from another era. What’s more prevalent now is a softer, sneakier expression of affluence, the clean, clinical stylings of the technocratic class. Luxury is no longer about wearing so many diamonds that you topple over; it’s about driving the quietest car, living in the most automated home, reducing the amount of friction you have to navigate in the world. Allbirds might be the closest the world of everyday fashion has come to embracing this ideal of optimized efficiency.
by Rachel Syme, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Christie Hemm Klok / NYT / Redux
[ed. I have two pairs and they're wonderful.]
