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Introduction

Chapter 1 Lawn tennis and the origins of modern sports shoes

Chapter 2 Sports style, youth, and modernity

Chapter 3 Sports shoes reborn

Chapter 4Skateboarding and reimagining sports shoes

Chapter 5 Sneakers, basketball, and hip hop

Chapter 6 Trainers on the soccer terraces

Chapter 7Athleisure, global production, and the postmodern sports shoe

Conclusion

NotesList of illustrationsSelected bibliographyAcknowledgmentsIndex

Contents

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6 The Sports Shoe

Introduction

I remember my first pair of proper trainers. My parents bought them some time in 1986, when I was seven years old. White, with three stripes in graded tones of blue on the side, plastic D-ring lace loops, and a blue heel tab bearing the adidas logo, they were a marker of my ascent into maturity, a symbol that—despite being only seven—I was moving into a more grown-up world. They were, of course, the best thing in my wardrobe and I wore them with pride. I was not alone in my beliefs. Among my male classmates, shoes and clothing bearing the brand-names adidas, Puma, Reebok, or Nike had a cachet unmatched by almost anything else, certainly not the lesser, cheaper brands that were the norm for many of us until we could persuade our parents otherwise. We looked and made careful, detailed assessments of the footwear we saw around us; without really understanding why, we thought sports shoes were simply better, more desirable. For me, those first adidas were followed by a pair of Nike runners, red and white, nylon and suede, with a chunky foam sole and blue swooshes on the side. After that came not one, but two pairs of Reebok: the first a pair of gray, black, and green running shoes with the evocative name, Rapide, the second a white tennis model with red and navy trim. Both came with an assurance stitched into the tongue that they were the same as those worn by the best athletes. In the years that followed, a steady stream of other shoes and brands came and went, a personal timeline against which I can track the major events of my childhood.

It is hard to determine why these shoes held such a strong attraction, why sports brands were elevated over others. In my memory, it was a complex mix of fashion, style, aesthetics, the influence of sports and other celebrities, cost, and status. Certain moments stand out. At some point in the late 1980s, I remember standing in amazement before a pair of Nike Air Max in a sports shop, astounded that it was possible to have a shoe with windows into and out of the midsole. Going up to secondary school, my friends and I spoke in similar awe of the Nike Air Jordan worn by one of our new classmates, this despite our never having set foot on a basketball court and knowing little of Michael Jordan or his signature shoes. It was the model’s clear plastic sole, space-age Air window, and high price that stunned us. It was an indication of things to come. During the early 1990s, we watched Nike’s ascendancy, as a series of innovations took trainer design in fascinating new directions. I, like many of my friends, felt pangs of desire for expensive shoes laden with gimmicky technology—not just from Nike—that at times appeared to have come directly from a schoolboy’s sketchpad. At weekends, we traipsed around local sports shops assessing the models on display, rarely, if ever, buying anything. In the middle of the

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0.1 Serve children’s shoes, adidas catalogue (UK), 1986.

decade, while others still sought technical wizardry, I embraced the trend for older, simpler models and wore the same Converse, Puma, and adidas as my musical heroes. Toward the end of the 1990s, as skateboard style became mainstream fashion, my small collection became a mix of skate shoes, retro models, and advanced sneaker technology. Although popular styles shifted and changed, throughout my childhood and adolescence, trainers were always the most significant part of my outfit.

This enthusiasm for sports shoes continued into adulthood and the twenty-first century. My first proper pay packets coincided with the big brands’ tentative attempts to capitalize on their back catalogues. I was finally able to buy the Air Maxes I wanted as a schoolboy. And the Air Jordans. At the same time, the spread of the internet and the development of online selling platforms afforded the opportunity to hunt secondhand shoes from previous eras. I amassed a small collection of obscure and forgotten models from the past, all of which were eventually sold on to other collectors and enthusiasts. It is now over thirty years since those first adidas, but my passion, though tempered by more adult concerns and not as intense as it once was, remains. The right pair of trainers still has the power to evoke feelings similar to those felt so many years ago.

The sports shoe market today is big business. In 2015 retail sales of sports shoes were estimated to be worth $2.8 billion in the United Kingdom, $9.4 billion in

Introduction

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8 The Sports Shoe

Germany, France, Italy, and Spain combined, and $36.3 billion in the United States.1 In recent years, major brands, retailers, press, and social media have combined to create a new and complex sneaker culture. Sneakers now connect the worlds of sports, fashion, celebrity, and everyday life in a way matched by few, if any, other products. They feature regularly in the fashion and style press, and are sold in the same way and are as susceptible to trends as other forms of clothing. Indeed, data suggest around only a quarter of sports shoes sold are worn for sports.2 What began as specialist products for niche markets are now worn everywhere, by everyone.

Yet few of us pause to ask where these shoes came from, or how they became so popular. How sports shoes moved from the sports field into the mainstream of everyday life is seldom considered. This book seeks to do just that, to explain how shoes designed for sporting activities came about, and how they came to be used for other, often far less strenuous, purposes than those for which they were initially intended. It considers how in the past sports shoes were made, sold, and worn, and examines how the ways in which people understand and understood them were generated, nurtured, and forgotten.3 It looks at how sports footwear was integrated into social practices, both sporting and otherwise, and at the relationships that existed between producers, sellers, and consumers.4 By exploring how new and unexpected ways of thinking about sports shoes influenced the processes of design and manufacture, it emphasizes that sports footwear has always been open to reinterpretation and recontextualization.5 The ways in which people used and thought about sports shoes were often not those anticipated by makers and sellers. Schoolboys in 1980s Britain were not the first, and were certainly not the last, to attach great importance to this type of footwear, nor were they the first to wear them outside the narrow confines of sport.

This book also seeks to show how sports shoes were part of broader historical narratives. Sneakers are often analyzed and celebrated as stylistic or symbolic objects, yet these are only two of the ways in which they can be interpreted.6 This book considers them too as manufactured, globally traded goods, and as examples of technological innovation. To do this, it takes into account the rise of sports, the industrialization of the footwear industry, the discovery of new materials, shifts in global trade, and the growth of new forms of consumer culture. By looking at sports shoes from different perspectives and in different contexts, it shows how social, cultural, and industrial phenomena were connected, and how both the physical reality of shoes and the ways in which people thought about them were affected by

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0.2 The author in Nike Roadrunner, 1987.

larger historical forces.7 It is only by considering how sports shoes fitted into wider networks of technology, fashion, commerce, politics, and shared attitudes that we can come to a true appreciation of their cultural significance.

Although many people remember their old sneakers with nostalgic warmth, reconstructing the history of sports footwear is an ambitious task. Few shoes from previous eras survive, with those that do now prized by collectors around the world. Barely any are held in museum collections. The big brands guard their archives closely. Ephemeral marketing materials are similarly hard to come by, as is reliable production or sales data. Production has always been spread around the world, and as manufacturers and retailers have disappeared and brand-names have passed between owners, what scant records existed in the first place have been lost. The problems inherent in what Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, in 1985 called “an industry with a high consumer profile but poor statistics, so that everyone has an opinion but no one is precisely sure what is going on,” are compounded for the historian.8 This book therefore casts the net wide for source material. It draws on a variety of documentary and physical evidence, with the traces of sports shoes left in photographs, drawings, catalogues, and advertising descriptions at its heart. The trade press, corporate material, popular and niche journalism, and material from film, television, and music are brought together to establish popular attitudes toward sneakers.

Introduction

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