This Was the Year of the Freaky Viral Shoe

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To close out the year, GQ is revisiting the most fascinating ideas, trends, people, and projects of 2023. For all of our year-end coverage, click here.

In late October, the comfort-loving Colorado footwear brand Crocs released its limited-edition Classic Cowboy Boot. A gaudy high-top made of whatever proprietary not-rubber polymer Crocs uses lately and adorned with what the brand has described as “metallic disco desert embroidery details,” the novelty boots arrived with a flurry of promotional fanfare designed from the ground-up to go viral—they even came affixed with Instagram-ready spurs, just to make it 100% clear that these are designed to court attention.

It’s not hard to imagine a time when such an exaggeratedly bizarre shoe might have broken the internet. In 2023, it barely registered. The Crocs Cowboy Boot came and went without much more than a curious glance and a passing mention. There was no mass frenzy. On StockX, they’re currently re-selling well below retail. It’s as if the world took one look at this strained effort to blow some minds with weirdness and said: We’ve seen weirder.

2023 was the year of weird shoes. It started in February with the enormously successful rollout of MSCHF’s successfully enormous Big Red Boots, which capitalized on a widespread fascination with all things futuristic to create something in the intersection of anime, 3D printing, and AI-generated art. Big shoes for a big era, in other words, and ideally timed to capture the zeitgeist. And while they will almost certainly be remembered as a short-lived fad rather than any kind of lasting footwear trend, the impact MSCHF had on the culture set the mood for the rest of the year in sneakers. Everybody wanted what the Big Red Boots had: to be weird enough to go viral.

Sometimes this meant playful collaborations and out-there twists on standard-issue drops: the Jarritos x Nike SB Dunks, channeling a bit of the lockdown-era whimsy of the Chunky Dunky, struck exactly the right note of winking humor, while some of Adidas’s latest collaborations with The Simpsons, particularly the “Homer Simpson” Stan Smith of internet meme fame, turned inside jokes into wearable punchlines, to very amusing effect. There’s still an air of trying hard to go viral with these releases, a sense of willing a “can you believe they made this into a shoe”-type reaction into being. But sometimes it really is surprising and impressive that a shoe brand went there, and if the results are fun, it’s hard to take issue with the intention.

Other times, though, trying hard starts to look a bit more like desperation—like throwing whatever comes to mind together in a bid for to strike a chord, any chord, with an audience of gawkers. Do you think the Cactus Plant Flea Market x Nike CPFM Flea1 is ugly? That dense thicket of green fur is there precisely to get people talking; whether that talk is positive or negative doesn’t matter. Are JW Anderson’s frog-faced clogs cool-looking or outrageous? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but they’re certainly a conversation-starter. All over the footwear world in 2023, the point seemed to be to generate buzz through sheer audacity. Who would wear those? Controversy is a means to success, maybe even more reliably than looking good.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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