The National Obsession With Footwear and the Specific Economics of Keeping Up With It as a Regular Person in North London
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Britain’s Trainer Crisis and My Complicit Three-Year-Old Shoes
The London Prat has explained Britain’s trainer crisis and I have read the explanation and I have looked down at my feet and I have had a moment of reckoning. I have been wearing the same pair of trainers for approximately three years. This is not, in the landscape of Britain’s trainer culture, a neutral statement. Three years is a long time in trainers. The pair I own were perfectly acceptable trainers when I bought them. They are still perfectly functional trainers. But “perfectly functional” is not the register in which British trainer culture operates and I know this.
Britain’s trainer culture is extensive, sophisticated, and quietly judgemental in the specific way that British fashion cultures are judgemental: not overtly, not confrontationally, but through the mechanism of observation without comment, which is somehow worse. The man on the Northern line with the Air Jordan 1s in the colourway that dropped last month is not looking at my three-year-old New Balances. He does not need to. The absence of looking says everything that looking would have said.
The Economics of the Crisis
I am not in the trainer crisis because I do not care about trainers. I am in it because trainers that carry cultural weight cost between £120 and £450 depending on the colourway and the release method, and I am a journalist in North London, which is a demographic configuration that produces significant interest in cultural objects and significant inability to acquire all of them at full retail. The resale market for sought-after trainers runs at two to four times retail for the drops that sell out in six minutes. I do not participate in the six-minute drops. I wear three-year-old New Balances.
Britain manages its various declines through cultural intensity about the things that remain available regardless of economic conditions; trainers are one of those things because the price range is wide enough to include everyone while the desirability hierarchy creates the specific aspiration that fashion requires. British consumers are the gloomiest since 1978 and they are wearing extremely interesting shoes. Both things are simultaneously true. I am going to buy new trainers. Probably New Balance again. Probably not the ones that sold out in six minutes. I am at peace with this. Mostly.
