The first time I tried on a pair of Allbirds sneakers, I was in the brand’s San Francisco boutique, sitting on a gently curved wooden stool designed to tip forward in aid of shoe-changing. The stool was created by the same people who design the start-up’s shoes, and it made me feel the same combination of familiarity and irritation: Do we really need tech to disrupt the established technology of stools and sneakers?
My answer, after sitting on the stool and trying the shoes, is a begrudging, contemptuous “sometimes.” The tip forward helped. And the shoes, I silently admitted to myself, were astonishingly comfortable.
Allbirds has been selling sneakers made from environmentally friendly materials since 2016. The brand’s most recognizable style is its Runner, which looks a lot like a logo-free, work-appropriate version of Nike’s popular Roshe One. It’s what a running shoe needs to be in order to fly under the radar in an office.
In theory, I should be the brand’s ideal customer: I hate uncomfortable shoes, I work in an office with a vaguely casual dress code, and I’ve owned several pairs of Roshe Ones. I’m a member of the digital creative class in which Allbirds has found its most dedicated market, which includes the Silicon Valley tech workers often characterized as the brand’s biggest fans. When I look around at work or in my neighborhood in New York City, I often spot a pair.
Instead, for Allbirds’ entire three-year existence, I’ve hated what I believed the company was pushing. I spent a decade covering the fashion industry, and the “noise” the company cut through with its super-simple shoes, I told myself, was actually a vibrant, imaginative world of glow-in-the-dark high tops and snakeskin stilettos. Allbirds seemed like a way for men to intellectualize their way out of personal taste in favor of start-up culture’s efficient sameness. I had, on more than one occasion, referred to the shoes derisively as “Yeezys for software developers.”
Press coverage of the company is divided along similar lines: Some writers praise the brand’s style and functionality, while others lament its popularity as proof that the algorithms are winning. Much of the fashion industry is firmly in the latter camp. (...)
As I tried on sneakers in the San Francisco Allbirds shop, I found myself in the middle of an existential crisis. I looked for the sense of aesthetic doom that critics assured me the shoes’ popularity promised. Instead of the suffocating sameness or joyless efficiency that critics have ascribed to the shoes, I saw just a small, conventional boutique in which a handful of customers ranging from teen boys to female retirees were trying on sneakers.
Tim Brown, Allbirds’ co-founder, seems aware of—and chafed by—the insinuation that his shoes are boring, or only for tech bros. “I actually think there is excitement in the simplicity and calmness, which belies an enormous amount of work,” he says of the design. He also says that women have always made up the majority of Allbirds’ customers.
I was having trouble remembering what so many fashion people found threatening. Upstairs from the shop, in an impromptu studio, some Allbirds employees were photographing the simple sneakers against an Instagram-friendly peachy background with giant Monstera leaves as props. On the feet of the young women who worked in the office, the shoes were free of the jarring, swagless business-athlesiure aesthetic I’d always associated them with.
Fashion’s acceptance of Allbirds, like Uggs, Birkenstocks, Crocs, and Tevas before it, has started to seem both inevitable and, at worst, completely fine. All it takes for any particular shoe to make the crossover is for some already-cool people to decide it should. (Case in point: New Balance sneakers are currently having a moment.)
My answer, after sitting on the stool and trying the shoes, is a begrudging, contemptuous “sometimes.” The tip forward helped. And the shoes, I silently admitted to myself, were astonishingly comfortable.
Allbirds has been selling sneakers made from environmentally friendly materials since 2016. The brand’s most recognizable style is its Runner, which looks a lot like a logo-free, work-appropriate version of Nike’s popular Roshe One. It’s what a running shoe needs to be in order to fly under the radar in an office.
In theory, I should be the brand’s ideal customer: I hate uncomfortable shoes, I work in an office with a vaguely casual dress code, and I’ve owned several pairs of Roshe Ones. I’m a member of the digital creative class in which Allbirds has found its most dedicated market, which includes the Silicon Valley tech workers often characterized as the brand’s biggest fans. When I look around at work or in my neighborhood in New York City, I often spot a pair.Instead, for Allbirds’ entire three-year existence, I’ve hated what I believed the company was pushing. I spent a decade covering the fashion industry, and the “noise” the company cut through with its super-simple shoes, I told myself, was actually a vibrant, imaginative world of glow-in-the-dark high tops and snakeskin stilettos. Allbirds seemed like a way for men to intellectualize their way out of personal taste in favor of start-up culture’s efficient sameness. I had, on more than one occasion, referred to the shoes derisively as “Yeezys for software developers.”
Press coverage of the company is divided along similar lines: Some writers praise the brand’s style and functionality, while others lament its popularity as proof that the algorithms are winning. Much of the fashion industry is firmly in the latter camp. (...)
As I tried on sneakers in the San Francisco Allbirds shop, I found myself in the middle of an existential crisis. I looked for the sense of aesthetic doom that critics assured me the shoes’ popularity promised. Instead of the suffocating sameness or joyless efficiency that critics have ascribed to the shoes, I saw just a small, conventional boutique in which a handful of customers ranging from teen boys to female retirees were trying on sneakers.
Tim Brown, Allbirds’ co-founder, seems aware of—and chafed by—the insinuation that his shoes are boring, or only for tech bros. “I actually think there is excitement in the simplicity and calmness, which belies an enormous amount of work,” he says of the design. He also says that women have always made up the majority of Allbirds’ customers.
I was having trouble remembering what so many fashion people found threatening. Upstairs from the shop, in an impromptu studio, some Allbirds employees were photographing the simple sneakers against an Instagram-friendly peachy background with giant Monstera leaves as props. On the feet of the young women who worked in the office, the shoes were free of the jarring, swagless business-athlesiure aesthetic I’d always associated them with.
Fashion’s acceptance of Allbirds, like Uggs, Birkenstocks, Crocs, and Tevas before it, has started to seem both inevitable and, at worst, completely fine. All it takes for any particular shoe to make the crossover is for some already-cool people to decide it should. (Case in point: New Balance sneakers are currently having a moment.)
by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Allbirds
[ed. I have a couple (Allbirds). They're great. I still like my Goodwill Puma's the best.]
