Goodbye long walks in ballet flats, hello Hokas.
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When Kamala Harris landed on the cover of Vogue in a pair of Converse, several corners of the internet lost their minds. (It wasn’t the shot her team approved; her more formal portrait, which they used for the digital version, would have been much more apt.) A more esoteric but no less passionate group echoed Ice Cube’s sentiment about the timeless, yet not quite supportive, piece of footwear.
“It’s crazy to think that them basketball cats played in Chuck Taylors,” he’s quoted saying in Spin’s oral history of the shoe. “I got Chucks in my suitcase right now, but that shit gives you flat feet.”
After conversations about race and representation, some of us wondered how a woman who regularly spends 15 hours a day on her feet was doing it on vulcanized rubber soles. Casual sneakers won’t do you dirty as dramatically as, say, Nancy Pelosi’s 4” stilettos or Hillary Clinton’s heels, but do you dirty they will. Choosing footwear with your middle-aged body in mind is serious business, and one ignores that body at one’s own peril.
If I have a fashion mantra, it’s something like DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. While I’ve never been the sort of woman who changes out of commuter shoes when she gets to the office or an event, I do sacrifice some comfort for appearance’s sake. I mentioned here a year ago that if you see me in a pair of ugly trainers, it’s because someone put them on my corpse. As a person in an unremarkable 40-something meat suit, I have that privilege — or I did, until suddenly, I didn’t.
New York City residents average something like twice most Americans’ daily step count, and in the fall of 2021 I was tripling my neighbors’ stats. I’d stuck with my lockdown-era habit of taking hour-long mental health walks around lower Manhattan, I’d started training for races around the city, and I’d joined friends in fixating on a team-based fitness app that translates workouts into fleeing and slaying hordes of zombies. I was also traveling with family and wore flimsy little ballet flats to wander around cobblestone-paved British towns for two weeks.
You see where this is going, no? I dressed as a plague doctor to run a Halloween 10K, and that was the last time I got around without jaw-clenching pain for a year and a half. I woke up November 1st with the telltale goddamn heelfire of plantar fasciitis, and that was that.
Plantar fasciitis is inflammation of and/or damage to the connective tissue between the heel and toes; extended bouts of standing, walking, and exercising without proper support can all precipitate it, and interventions like ice massage, physical therapy, and orthotics can (but don’t necessarily!) help resolve it. Mine left me staggering out of bed every morning and unable to so much as trot through a crosswalk for 18 months.
I felt like the old-school Little Mermaid who woke up with legs only to feel that she walked everywhere on sharp knives, for a malevolent crone had swindled her (I was the malevolent crone who had swindled me). The PF originated in my right foot, but every tendon and muscle that pitched in to cover for it — not unlike me as I’d paced around my hotel rooms to offset slacking fitness-app teammates — paid a price. No treatment seemed to make a lick of difference, and when my heel pain finally disappeared as abruptly as it had descended, I’d learned only that I never, ever wanted to invite it back. Virtual zombies can eat me and my friends. No more long walks in cute flats.
It’s been two and a half years since my PF resolved itself, and my errands, walks, and runs now add up to just over eight miles a day; I’ve run three half marathons this year and have two more to go. I’ve also — how to concede this? — become athleisure-curious for the first time in my relationship with shoes. I’m open, or ajar, to casual shoes that share DNA with the abominations I wear to train and race. I tell myself that gorpcore technical shoes are in this decade what knockaround Chucks were in my childhood and teens.
You probably don’t need me to tell you that Converse’s contemporary equivalent here is Hoka, a French company founded by a couple of trail-running Salomon alums. After a few years of relatively modest growth, Hoka was acquired by a massive California-based parent company (which slings similarly-polarizing technical brands like UGG and Teva) in 2013; over the next decade its annual sales leapt from $3 million to $1.4 billion.
Joe Biden wore them at the White House! Harry Styles worked out in them! Taylor Swift wore them while making “The Life of a Showgirl” (which could explain why it feels so transactional; I will not be taking questions at this time)! I wouldn’t have expected boomers and zoomers to clasp hands over conspicuously-cushioned, ultra-lightweight athletic shoes, but if I had the ability to predict how and why disparate generations find common ground I would be out fixing America instead of writing about my feet, probably.
Hoka got my attention through a limited-edition collaboration with a design house I find interesting. (Converse pioneered this power move decades ago with brands like Comme Des Garcons and Margiela; Hoka now courts new fans with partners like Reformation and Free People.) I requested a pair from their partnership with Studio Proba, a catch-all lifestyle outfit that colors and reshapes everything from architecture and sculpture to furniture and candles, and a few weeks later, these babies hit my apartment door with a thump. I immediately sent an unboxing photo to my stepfather, a devotee who’s found Hokas can mitigate his peripheral neuropathy.
It sounds like we might have the beginnings of a team uniform for walks this fall? Gen X checks in! I texted the family group chat.
My mom texted back: Ha! (Yes!)
Reader, I wore them. I wore them to volunteer shifts where I stood for hours on end, and I wore them to walk uptown and back all summer; I wore them to meet my husband at the hip dine-in movie theater across the river, and I wore them to visit my sister in California. Eventually, I started reaching out for them on purpose to complement other parts of my outfits! A few hundred miles in, their squishiness persists and my once-beleaguered feet have no comment. This is the dream after a sports injury, or maybe just the dream of every middle-age person walking around: a body that has no comment.
Endurance athletes like to speak of the mental toughness one develops by maximizing physical potential through self-regulation. That toughness is addictive, and I’ve savored the times I’ve called my body’s bluffs on exhaustion. One could argue that it’s another flavor of sacrificing comfort for appearance’s sake, however, it can be a dangerous one: More than a dozen runners were hospitalized at my unseasonably-humid half-marathon this spring. My toes started to throb as I crested a hill in the eighth mile of my last race; like they had when I was compensating for my plantar fasciitis. I tried to tell myself that I could grit my teeth through 45 more minutes of pain, what’s 45 minutes, but I slowed to a walk two miles later. The stakes were too high.
My huge-soled, high-concept mesh shoes have endured in my wardrobe as casual workhorses. They can stay out after the sun goes down on special (but not too special) occasions. I wouldn’t wear them on Air Force One, but I’d wear them to compose an awkward Charli XCX diss track. I am mature enough, if you will, to acknowledge that I have to baby my feet most of the time if I want to punish them some of the time — and it’s handy as hell that responsible shoes are now ubiquitous streetwear. Speaking of streetwear, I learned in that oral history of Chucks that the Ramones were really into…Keds?
“Dee Dee and I switched over to the Chuck Taylors,” quoth Marky, “because they stopped making [the style of] U.S. Keds and Pro-Keds [that we liked]. A lot of sneakers look orthopedic—Chuck Taylors don’t, and they looked good with the Perfecto black leather jacket and Levi’s. Joey never wore them. He needed a lot of arch support and Chuck Taylors are bad for that. Johnny wore Reeboks. I could feed you a bunch of shit, but that’s the truth.”
My truth, in turn, is that in falling for my jolie laide kicks I decided I needed a pair of the Marni x Hoka sneakers. The e-commerce portal misgauged their stock and canceled my order, thus saving me from myself, but I know where I’m willing to go now — and I’m comfortable with that.
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by Lauren Oster
Lauren Oster lives on New York City’s Lower East Side and has written about George Orwell for the New York Times, water cremation for Smithsonian Magazine, and insomnia for Martha Stewart Living. In high school, she snuck up to L.A. and got a neck tattoo based on The Smashing Pumpkins’ album art.
