IN THE SHOE market, weirdness has won. Take a spin through a department store’s footwear floor and you’ll find a buffet of bizarre high-fashion shoes like a Bottega Veneta women’s $1,250 blocky wedge heel with red, chicken pox-like specks or J.W. Anderson’s unisex $645 leather mule with a gigundo Mr. T-esque gold chain across the front.
It’s not only high-end designers that have come down with a case of the weirds. Approachable retailer Zappos.com offers $65 platform Crocs in a zesty zebra print and $120 clementine-orange, hefty-soled Hoka One One running shoes. “There is a real appetite for color, pattern and interesting fabrication,” said Catherine Newell-Hanson, the site’s style director. Shoes, she continued, have become “a safe space for people to play around with a more outlandish expression of personal style than they might in the rest of [their] outfit.”
There are precursors to this trend—like Margiela’s cloven Tabi boots, which debuted in 1988—but the weird-is-good movement has truly erupted over the past half-decade. It’s been gaining ground in the pandemic, as WFH freedom to experiment away from co-workers’ critical eyes has coincided with a drive toward comfort at any cost. In 2017, the launch of Balenciaga’s bulbous, pre-weathered Triple S sneakers set a new standard for intentionally ugly designer shoes. Meanwhile, frumpy Crocs and Birkenstocks were being recontextualized as beloved, even covetable, shoes, a trend spurred by collaborations with stars like Justin Bieber and luxury brands like Jil Sander, respectively.
The forces of casualization have made office footwear like shiny dress shoes and chaste heels—once a crucial adult investment—increasingly irrelevant. It’s now acceptable to wear startlingly informal shoes daily. “The more outrageous [the shoe], the better,” said Jessica Pridgen, 37, a graphic designer in Raleigh, N.C. She owns a multitude of statement shoes including Bottega Veneta boots with a globular toe and stacked-sole Nike sneakers made in collaboration with Japanese label Sacai.
The pandemic accelerated the trend, said Ms. Newell-Hanson of Zappos. Free from the strictures of an office, work-from-homers began purchasing diverting shoes. It’s hard not to smile (or smirk) at a pair of wacky tie-dye Crocs or furry purple Marni mules. Who didn’t need that his year? And when your only daily excursion is a brisk dog-walk or an efficient march though the grocery store, function trumps formality: All you really need is doughy gray New Balances or springy Keen mules.
