THE CASE FOR CROCS

FASHION

Moonset Magazine on why the shoe hasn't changed much, but perhaps we have.

Most fashion rehabilitations involve a redesign. The object is slimmed, restyled, given a better last or a cleaner sole, and returns as a chastened version of itself. Crocs did not do this. The clog that turns up on a runway is recognisably the clog that turned up at a boat show in 2002, with the same thirteen holes and the same bulbous toe box, and the only honest conclusion is that the change happened on our side.

What it actually is

Crocs was founded in 2002 by Scott Seamans, Lyndon Hanson and George Boedecker Jr, and the first model — the Beach — was shown at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show that year. It was a boating shoe. The holes were ventilation and drainage. The shape was dictated by wanting something you could hose down on a deck.

The material matters more than the silhouette, and it is the part most often got wrong. Crocs are not rubber and they are not plastic in the ordinary sense. They are made from a proprietary closed-cell resin foam called Croslite, which the company secured exclusive rights to in 2004 by acquiring the Canadian firm Foam Creations. Closed-cell means the gas bubbles in the foam are sealed from each other, which is why the shoe is light, does not soak up water, and warms slightly to the foot rather than staying cold the way a solid polymer would.

This is not a footnote. The entire cultural argument about Crocs — that they are ugly but unreasonably comfortable — rests on a material property. You cannot make that shoe thinner and keep what it does.

The charms did the work

If you want the single mechanism that turned a functional clog into a fashion object, it is not a designer collaboration. It is Jibbitz.

Sheri Schmelzer made the first ones in 2005 in her basement in Boulder, Colorado, pushing silk flowers and beads into the holes of her children's shoes to keep them entertained. Crocs bought the business the following year for a reported ten million dollars. Those charms now generate something in the region of two hundred and fifty million dollars a year.

The commercial story is striking, but the cultural story is more interesting. A plain clog is a statement about you that you did not get to write — it says practical, or indifferent, or tired. The same clog with charms on it is a statement you did write. The holes, which existed to drain seawater, turned out to be a grid for self-expression, and that converted a shoe people apologised for into a shoe people curate.

Look at what the UK searches for and the pattern is obvious: not the classic clog on its own, but the collaborations and the variants — the Umbro tie-ins, the cartoon-character editions, the sandal versions. People are not shopping for footwear. They are shopping for a particular joke they want to be in on.

Balenciaga, and the mechanics of permission

The fashion moment is usually dated to October 2017, when Demna Gvasalia showed platform Crocs as part of Balenciaga's spring 2018 ready-to-wear collection in Paris, complete with oversized Jibbitz including the Balenciaga logo. A later collaboration added heels and rain boots.

It is tempting to read this as a luxury house conferring legitimacy downwards. That is not quite what happened. Gvasalia's whole method at Balenciaga was to take objects that were already enormously popular and socially embarrassing — the DHL T-shirt, the IKEA-style tote, the chunky dad trainer — and present them without irony at a price that made refusing to laugh compulsory. The clog was not chosen because it was obscure. It was chosen because it was everywhere and nobody would admit to liking it.

What a runway does in that situation is narrow: it grants permission. The shoe was already comfortable, already cheap, already owned by millions of people. It just needed the social cost of wearing it in public to drop to zero.

Why the cost dropped

Several things moved at once, and none of them were design decisions.

The obvious one is the long softening of the dress code. Years of working from home, of offices abandoning formal footwear, of the gym shoe becoming the default street shoe, removed most of the occasions on which you would be judged for what was on your feet.

The second is that comfort stopped being an admission of defeat. There was a long period in which visible comfort read as giving up — orthopaedic, elderly, unbothered. That association has thinned considerably, helped by a generation of consumers who talk openly about their feet, their backs and their standing jobs, and who regard a shoe that hurts as a design failure rather than a price worth paying.

The third is that ugliness became a usable signal. A conventionally pretty shoe says you are trying to look nice. A deliberately unlovely one says you have the confidence not to need to, which is a more expensive thing to communicate. Fashion has always traded in scarcity, and when attractiveness is cheap, indifference to it is scarce.

The case, stated plainly

The argument for Crocs is not that they are beautiful. It is that they are an unusually honest object. The shape is entirely determined by what the shoe is for. The holes are functional. The material does exactly one thing, extremely well, and the company has never pretended otherwise or quietly made the shoe worse to chase a trend.

There is a version of good taste that consists of recognising when an object is doing its job properly, regardless of whether it flatters. On that measure the clog has always been well designed, and the twenty-odd years it spent as a punchline say more about the people laughing than about the shoe.

It has not changed much. We have.

Sources

• Crocs, Inc. company history and corporate information, on founding, the Beach model and the acquisition of Foam Creations
• Contemporary business reporting on the Jibbitz acquisition and its current contribution to revenue
• Fashion trade press coverage of the Balenciaga spring 2018 ready-to-wear collection and subsequent collaborations
• Google Trends, United Kingdom, on search interest in Crocs collaborations and variants