Stepping into the absurdity of the big red boots and what their hype tells us about society, culture and hype.
Love them or hate them, chances are you have come across the bizarre big red boots. Round, comical and very out of the ordinary, these fashion statement pieces are nothing short of absurd. Much like anything the internet obsesses over, they are a great indication of the collective conscious, indicators of trends, thought and fashion at a very specific point in time.
So tie your shoelaces (or don’t if you’re wearing the big red boots), and let’s see what all of this is about.
The Background Story
As one could expect, the big red boots were born in New York. They are fruit of creative design studio MSCHF, who’s design style tests creativity through a very stereotypical Gen-Z type of irony. We’re talking about things like a large bag with the words “made in Italy” plastered on top or a medical orthopaedic boot turned into a shoe because, “who said medical equipment was not meant to be used?”
Almost as absurd as the boots themselves is the fact that they went off stock 24h after being launched onto the market. Priced at around 350USD, owning a pair has quickly become the synonym of hype, fashionable and on-trend.
What it Shows
Hype is a great reflection of society. What we gift our time and attention to is not only worth fat chunks of money, but mirrors of what is going on inside our brains. Which makes the big red boots a great starting point to start analysing what on earth is going on with us in 2023.
Tiktoker The Algorithm calls is the fashion of hyperreality, which she describes as the inability to distinguish fashion, from its representation. It’s something we’re seeing a lot nowadays, with AI twisting what we know as real – think of prompt generated images, or entire books written by Chat GPT. The question at hand is this; if we’ve gotten really good at imitating reality, why can’t reality get really good and it’s imitations?
Not to mention, the boots are kind of ugly. Ugly fashion, or fashion that challenges the traditional canon of aesthetics (symmetry, colour combinations, etc), has been taking the world by storm recently. It’s all part of this anti-establishment feeling society has been cultivating since the rise of COVID, which has already catapulted trends such as the notorious “norm-core” into the centre of everyone’s attention.
Standards are being broken, norms are challenged and boots are no longer slim-fit but open, round and entirely absurd.