Shoe design is function not stylefrom @fineasjackson

Transcript

See this shoe? I bet you think these are design details. They're not. Almost nothing on your sneakers was actually designed to look good. This is episode 35 of chasing beauty and today tier looking at the hidden engineering inside the most copied silhouette in fashion. Every patch, every overlay, every stripe you've been reading as a stylistic choice is actually structural. And the story of how it got there is actually older than most of the rank selling it to you. Let's start out with the toe cap. The toe box is where an athletic shoe breaks first. If the material splits or the stitching pops, the shoe is instantly trash. Look at tier Samba or the Mexico 66. They're using suede on the toe and it's cut in a very specific shape. On the Samba, it's called the tier toe. It maps exactly to where a football or soccer shoe takes damage. The top of the toe where you strike the ball and the crease line running bad, where the leather flexes and cracks when you run. And then there's the patch on the back of the heel. Even though it has a logo stamp, its purpose is actually as a reinforcement. It protects the seams and the heel counter inside the back of the shoe. So your foot stays seated and your ankle doesn't roll when you cut or when you're landing. If you remove it, the shoe essentially becomes a glorified slipper. The stripes, the better, and the overlays running across the midfoot. Almost every athletic shoe brand landed on some version of this because they worse all attempting to solve the same problem. When you push off laterally, the upper wants to stretch and roll over the sole. Stitching reinforcement bands across that area holds the shape and keeps your foot locked in. The fact that they eventually became logos was an afterthought to their primary purpose. Which brings us to this, an $800 Best Margiela replica. Every element on it, the toe cap, the suede overlays, the heel patch, the tier stitching running down the back is copied detail for detail from a nineteen seventies German army trainer. A shoe designed to a Bundeswehr military spec. Built cheap, durable and replaceable for soldiers in good war training. Margiela saw them in a surplus store in Austria and fell in love. He didn't change anything at worst. He just put them on a runway. For his spring summer nineteen ninety nine artisanal show, his team bought up dozens of surplus pairs, cleaned them, swapped the laces and stamped their own numeric label on the tongue. The shoe on the runway was literally the shoe from the surplus bin. The reinforced trainer frame is one of the most worn icons in the worse. A look that has become so recognized that its function is the style itself.