In 1936, Meret Oppenheim, a Swiss Surrealist artist, had tea with Pablo Picasso during a Café de Flore, in Paris. Oppenheim was wearing a bracelet, of her possess design, that was clad in ocelot fur. Picasso dignified it, observant that one could cover anything with fur. Soon afterward, Oppenheim constructed her many famous work: a teacup, saucer, and ladle lonesome with a creamy-tan fur of a Chinese gazelle. The square is now in a collection of a Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and is distinguished for a revealing and of a domestic and a erotic. Oppenheim’s teacup came to mind final fall, while we was browsing in a shoe store and beheld that Birkenstock had combined a singular chronicle of a Arizona sandal—the classic, two-strap character prolonged adored by hippies and German tourists. The sandal had a informed corpulent cork bottom and thick, buckled straps in lifeless brown-gray suède, yet a insole and a straps were lined with feathery white shearling. The shoe looked alluringly comfortable, like a Teddy bear that cuddled back. It also looked perplexingly impractical: if it’s cold adequate for fur, it’s too cold—and approaching too wet—for open-toed shoes. The sandal was witty, provocative, and somewhat silly. Like an iPad, or an eight-dollar bottle of cold-pressed juice, it seemed a covetable answer to a need that hadn’t existed before it came along.
In new years, a modest Birkenstock has turn a curiously select object. The company’s classical sandals have been ubiquitous in my Brooklyn neighborhood. It seems to be a singular lady who doesn’t possess a span or dual of stout Birkenstock thongs, called Gizehs, utterly if she spends a lot of time pulling a hiker or doing a elementary-school run. Women like me who, in a twenties and early thirties, blithely shifted between a palliate of flip-flops and a imprisonment of high heels, were relieved to find some agreeably support for a increasingly prime feet. Women are so accustomed to a expectancy that boots will be uncomfortable—they will chafe a heels, or squish a toes, or make a insteps ache—that slipping on Birkenstocks felt revelatory.
Some of my peers found Birkenstocks irredeemably ugly, or too clear a sign of their shambolic college days; or they disliked a approach that Birkenstocks can demeanour alarmingly boatlike on incomparable feet. But others, like me, desired a fact that they granted comfort yet totally capitulating on style. Recently, a sandals had turn accessible not customarily in silt brownish-red or silt beige yet also in contemporary hues like china and obvious white. Even if Birkenstocks were best kept out of a stadium sprinkler, a misfortune thing about them was that, come colder weather, we had to take them off.
The bushy Birkenstock got a start on a Paris runway. In 2012, Phoebe Philo, a artistic executive of Céline, presented her latest collection on models wearing Arizona-style sandals lined with mink. Céline’s loyalty to Birkenstocks, that conform magazines began pursuit Furkenstocks, became a prohibited item: Miley Cyrus was photographed wearing a bejewelled span with harem pants and a bra top. That season, Giambattista Valli, a Italian designer, charity a lead chronicle of Birkenstocks, edged with studs. And afterwards Givenchy constructed a possess turn on Birkenstocks: sandals finished of soothing black leather printed with a ethereal settlement of pinkish roses. Even Manolo Blahnik, a engineer of unequivocally high-heeled shoes, announced himself a Birkenstock aficionado—when it came to his possess feet, during least. Not prolonged ago, Vogue posted a story on a Web site patrician “Pretty Ugly: Why Vogue Girls Have Fallen for Birkenstock.” Emma Morrison, a conform assistant, was quoted saying, “There’s zero improved than a unequivocally flattering dress with an nauseous shoe.”
The Birkenstock association traces a roots to 1774. Church annals in Langen-Bergheim, a city outward Frankfurt, prove that one Johann Adam Birkenstock was purebred there as a shoemaker. In a late nineteenth century, a successor named Konrad Birkenstock non-stop dual shops in Frankfurt. He finished shoes, not sandals. At a time, a insoles of boots were typically flat; Konrad’s creation was to make boots with insoles that were contoured to fit and support a foot.
In a early twentieth century, as shoe prolongation became increasingly industrialized, Konrad grown stretchable rubber insoles that could be extrinsic into commercially finished boots to emanate a gentle Fussbett, or “foot bed.” (Early Birkenstock shoeboxes featured an painting of a giant’s feet on a bed.) He became an orthopedic authority, as did his son, Carl Birkenstock, who assimilated a family business in a teens. Carl eventually wrote several books and pamphlets about feet health; they were filled with cross-sectional drawings of feet tiny by inapt shoes. Carl Birkenstock’s son Karl assimilated a business, and in a sixties a association began producing sandals. According to association lore, Karl experimented in his family kitchen, baking a mix of cork and latex to furnish a element that was light, resilient, and supportive.
The company’s initial sandal, called a Madrid, had a contoured cork feet bed and a buckled tag that crossed in a rope during a toes. It was an practice sandal rather than a conform item: a shoe was ostensible to feel as if it would tumble off unless a wearer constantly gripped a contoured toe bar, toning a calf flesh in a process. The Germans, unsurprisingly, have a word for this phenomenon: Angstreflex, or “fear reflex.”
Birkenstock was not a customarily German association clinging to formulating boots that strengthened a foot. Orthopedic boots is to Germany what seat settlement is to Sweden: Worishofer sandals also underline a cork solitary and a contoured feet bed, and Berkemann creates sandals with soles of lightweight poplar wood. Germans have prolonged extolled a virtues of walking. The sauna enlightenment of a nineteenth century, that drew tourists from all over Europe, cultivated a robe of healing walking after showering or celebration a waters. The appropriateness of a clever feet as a substructure of a healthy physique shabby a theories of such nineteenth-century total as Sebastian Kneipp, a Bavarian Catholic clergyman who advocated walking barefoot in soppy grass, on soppy stones, and by snow. (A line of bath and beauty products is still finished underneath his name.) German podiatric concerns also had a darker expression: Sander Gilman, a historian of medicine, has remarkable that, in anti-Semitic German-language novel of a fin de siècle, a flat, deformed feet was no reduction a mimic of a Jew than was a bending nose.
In December, we visited Neustadt, a city nearby Bonn, that is home to Birkenstock’s headquarters: a glass-and-blond-wood building set in forested hills. The campus—as it is known, in a demeanour of tech companies—is self-consciously modern, fitting a association that now focusses reduction on illness as a problem and some-more on wellness as an aesthetic. As we waited in a accepting area that was given with stools built from blocks of cork, a guard by a accepting list showed images from a stirring children’s collection: a pleasant loop of ethnically opposite preschoolers, pouting or grinning during a camera, pigeon-toed in patterned Mary Jane clogs or teeny Arizona sandals.
My revisit fell on a cold, stormy day, and we was wearing audacious La Canadienne boots. But when we was escorted to a bureau of Oliver Reichert, one of a company’s dual tip executives, we found him wearing beige fur-lined Arizonas, sockless, interconnected with jeans and a cashmere sweater. Reichert, an commanding forty-four-year-old with thick golden hair and a scruff of beard, receptively discharged my concerns about a regard of his feet. He’d be wearing a fur sandals, he said, until a heat outward forsaken to subsequent freezing: “It is utterly comfortable, and it is unequivocally gentle and fresh, so it’s unequivocally good.”
Last year, scarcely twenty million pairs of Birkenstocks were sold. The Furkenstocks conform impulse was unsought, Reichert told me, and something of a distraction. “We are not calculating what a subsequent conform trend is,” he said. “To be honest, it will be improved to be not so many in conform right now.” It had been tough to keep adult with direct for certain styles, like a Arizona in white leather with a white sole. It was preferable to prove kindly rising demand. Reichert said, “We are O.K. with carrying a vicious mass out there, and operative with them, and not carrying millions on tip customarily rush in and rush out one day, given for a association it is complicated to hoop this.”
The brand’s resurgence was no tiny trend, he argued: a incomparable informative change was underneath way. Women were noticing that many boots was unhealthy. (What is a indicate of carrying a Fitbit on your wrist if your boots make it punishing to walk?) Reichert said, “You can't transport all day like this”—he shifted his weight onto his toes, afterwards minced brazen for a few steps, as if he were wearing heels. “Talk to your friends, and ask them to uncover we their feet. You will see a lot of curved feet, and we will say, ‘This is torture.’ ” The recognition of Birkenstocks, he argued, indicated a enterprise for a lapse to a some-more healthy state, during slightest where boots was concerned. “People say, ‘People will be totally nauseous that way’—you don’t do any pedicure during all, we are not soaking your hair, we are not holding showers given it is bad for nature, we are not regulating soap,” he said. “I am not articulate about this! we am saying, Accept that a tellurian being is built like this.”
Consumers, Reichert noted, have turn increasingly endangered about a provenance of what they wear, and about a environmental and amicable impact of their wardrobe choices. Birkenstock is unapproachable that a sandals are still finished in Germany, rather than in China, and a association honors a guarantee to correct worn-out sandals, no matter how decrepit. “Ask your mom and she will contend this is normal—yes, we buy boots during a shoe store, and we move a boots behind and they correct them,” he said. “In former days, a span of boots was an costly thing. Now we can buy a span of trousers for underneath 10 euros during Primark”—a low-cost European chain—“but this will be a brief trend, and afterwards it will be gone. Because even a youngest kids will know that, in Bangladesh, someone had to humour for their ten-euro trousers, and it is not a satisfactory understanding during all.”
Reichert insincere his care purpose during Birkenstock in 2013, with a charge of restructuring a association that had turn unmanageable in a classification and dangerous in a production. As Karl Birkenstock withdrew from association operations, in a aughts, government and tenure of a association upheld to his 3 sons: Christian, Stephan, and Alex Birkenstock. It was not a successful arrangement. There were dozens of subsidiaries and lines, any headed by a opposite brother, and mostly competing opposite one another. “It was like a outrageous nightmare—everybody with his teams,” Reichert says. Two years ago, Stephan left a business. (“I was a heavyweight boxer, and we assured him to leave,” Reichert told me, convincingly.) Ownership is now divided between Christian and Alex, yet they are no longer actively involved. “The mistake was finished by Karl Birkenstock,” Reichert told me. “A unequivocally European mistake. You should select one. Like in a monarchy. You can’t say, ‘I was king, we have 3 sons, so we order a dominion in 3 pieces.’ ”
Reichert has sought to try new markets. He expects to start charity Birkenstock leather bags, and wants to enhance into other products that stress comfort, including mattresses and list chairs. These skeleton competence not all compensate off—it’s tough to suppose Birkenstock displacing Vitra in a corporate boardroom—but Reichert is undaunted. “It is a sleeping giant,” he pronounced of a company. “If we try to watchful a sleeping giant, we should do it solemnly and unequivocally smoothly, given if he moves too quick he will destroy a lot of things. So we are kissing, touching, unequivocally solemnly perplexing to arise him up.”
Reichert has been introducing other Birkenstocks for cold weather. For years, a association has finished a jackass called a Boston, that in Germany is typically ragged as an indoor shoe. Last fall, a shearling-lined Boston, in slate-blue suède, seemed in stores. we possess a pair, and they are a best evidence we know of for operative from home. No matter how peculiar a new Birkenstock competence seem during first, Reichert told me, wearing is believing. “This is a sorcery about a product—you don’t have to speak about it, we simply uncover a product, give it to a people to try on,” Reichert said. “You try to tarry your initial visible influence. It is adore on a second sight.”
One of Birkenstock’s categorical factories is outward Görlitz, that is sixty miles easterly of Dresden, in Saxony. Görlitz was spared a aerial bombing that gutted Dresden’s architectural heart during a Second World War, and it is infrequently called a many pleasing city in Germany. Gorgeously embellished medieval, Baroque, and poetic buildings cluster on hilly cobblestone streets that lead to lifelike marketplace squares. A pretentious Art Nouveau dialect store, now shuttered yet scheduled to free as a offered center, doubled as a interior of a Grand Budapest Hotel in a Wes Anderson film.
Birkenstock employs some 9 hundred people in Görlitz. When we visited a factory, it smelled as sharp as a bakery, aromatic with a smell of cooking latex and cork. In a area where soles are made, glass ethylene-vinyl acetate—a flexible, lightweight polymer famous as E.V.A.—was being poured into footprint-shaped molds on a carrousel. Nearby were dozens of bales of jute, dual layers of that are compulsory for any feet bed. Across a bureau were several huge tanks filled with glass latex. In a hangar-size room, sacks containing ground-up cork, alien from Portugal, were massed in rows. One pouch was open, and we reached in for a handful of cork. It was startlingly light to a touch, and felt as if we were using my fingers by beach silt on a world with a obtuse gravitational lift than Earth’s.
To form a signature Birkenstock feet bed, a latex and a cork are blended in a exclusive formula, formulating a brownish granulated pulp that, in a prebaked state, bears an hapless visible similarity to cat vomit. In a vulcanization area, that was agreeably warm, we watched as totalled quantities of this pulp were spewed mechanically into dozens of stainless-steel, foot-shaped molds. A immature male in shorts and a T-shirt worked quickly along a line: he pulpy a covering of jute onto any raise of cork-and-latex mixture, afterwards surfaced it with a skinny suède liner, like a dusty tobacco leaf, before shunting it into an oven.
Upstairs, a prolongation line continued: immature women embellished a additional jute and leather from a vulcanized product of a oven, brownish-red ribbons of element pier around their feet, like a rubbish left over by a fishmonger. Other women, sitting underneath splendid dressmakers’ lights, remarkable tiny pieces of leather with tailors’ chalk, indicating a indicate where a feet bed would be attached. A group of 5 was handling a appurtenance that constructed black Milano sandals—an Arizona with a heel strap—in distance 37. One readied a pieces of leather, now versed with buckles, to be glued to a feet bed; another granted a soles. Hilmar Knoll, a factory’s prolongation manager, who conducted me around a factory, did a fast calculation: among cutters, packers, appurtenance operators, and control checkers, any Birkenstock sandal is overwhelmed by a hands of nineteen people in a manufacture.
Birkenstocks aren’t cheap—in Germany, a simple Arizona costs forty-nine euros. (A span costs a hundred dollars here.) Recently, a association launched an bid to strech business who need a reduction costly shoe, by producing sandals finished from ethylene-vinyl acetate. At a factory, glass E.V.A., in black, white, red, and blue, was being poured into molds expel from Birkenstock’s core styles: a Arizona, a Madrid, a Gizeh. These models, that sell for about twenty-five euros, are dictated to dig markets where Birkenstock has had tiny impact, such as South America and tools of Southeast Asia. This summer, a boots will also be accessible in some U.S. locations. Finally, there are Birkenstocks that can be ragged in a stadium sprinkler.
In 2013, Birkenstock hired a initial executive of product and design, Rudy Haslbeck, who was charged with kindly modernizing a brand. When we met him, in a salon of a Birkenstock campus, he was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, a Schott leather jacket, an Hermès scarf, and Birkenstock’s chronicle of a high-end sandal, a Milano Exquisite, whose feet bed is wholly lonesome with a same black leather from that a straps are made. Haslbeck told me that he’d never ragged Birkenstocks before holding a job, and had primarily showed adult to work in sneakers, to his boss’s dismay: “Oliver asked me, ‘Why aren’t we wearing Birkenstocks?’ And we said, ‘There are 3 character discipline for men. One, do not wear brief trousers off a beach. Two, don’t wear short-sleeved shirts. And, three, don’t wear sandals.’ And he was like, ‘Forget series three.’ ”
Haslbeck forked during a salon shelves. “All a products in this room are joined by one singular thing,” he told me. “You contingency not change a feet bed. So design-wise this is unequivocally challenging.” Some tweaks were unequivocally subtle. A man’s sandal called a Zurich—which was introduced scarcely fifty years ago, and consists of a singular far-reaching tag covering many of a mid-foot—had been updated with thicker leather, corpulent bullion buckles, and a kind of crêpe solitary found on a Clarks dried boot. “It is unequivocally heavy, unequivocally masculine,” Haslbeck said. “You customarily buy this once in your life, given it will final forever.”
Other designs were some-more adventurous. There was a Boston jackass finished from textured velvet in flush or gold, desirous by a Persian-lamb cloak that Haslbeck had detected in a flea market. An Arizona sandal had a rose-gold leather feet bed and an top finished from pinkish-peach tweed threaded with shimmering silver. It looked as if it had been cut from a sleeve of a Chanel jacket. Another Arizona sandal, in black leather, had been lined in sapphire-blue shearling. “The initial year, we did white,” he explained. “This season, we thought, Now we can supplement color.” There were even a few sandals with built heels that were about an in. high. “It’s a many gentle height,” Haslbeck said. “Waitresses during restaurants, they customarily have a heel like that.”
This fall, a association skeleton to deliver a operation of closed-toe boots and boots that demeanour like typical boots yet feel on a inside like Birkenstocks. To emanate a shoe with a some-more streamlined profile, Haslbeck explained, he had embellished a saucer-like edge of a Birkenstock feet bed—which, in a sandal, protects a foot, yet that also creates a vast feet demeanour even larger. He showed me a dainty span of mauve high-top boots with a white sneaker bottom. They were suggestive of Campers: charity comfort while also being childish and energetic. Next was a black ankle feet for men. It was unfit to tell that it was a Birkenstock, unless we felt inside.
Haslbeck afterwards presented a women’s lace-up feet in varnished brownish-red leather and lined with shearling. Its toe box had a same figure as a Birkenstock clog—roomy around a large toe, and tapering to a pinkie—but a family similarity was that of apart cousins, not siblings. The boot, he noted, could be ragged yet hosiery all winter—like an Ugg, a Australian sheepskin bootie that was creatively designed for surfers rising from cold water. Haslbeck suggested that we try on a lace-up boot, and we slipped my unclothed feet into it. With a regard and density of a fur, and a cradling comfort of a feet bed, it felt wonderful. we cruise we competence have gasped.
“That is what we expected,” Haslbeck said.
Haslbeck was wearing thick black hosiery with his Milanos. “My grandma knitted them,” he said. He elite them to a barefoot character adopted by his boss. “Oliver is a tough guy,” he said. “I am pang from cold feet, generally in a morning.” In a fall, a association skeleton to deliver a line of socks, finished by a partner in Germany, alongside a offered debate compelling “socks and ’Stocks” as a stylish choice for Americans. This bid competence not succeed, yet a hosiery are charming. After we examined a antecedent of knee-high hosiery in a textured oatmeal yarn, we was shown a tube of four-ply cream-colored cashmere, like a lush wire sweater for an indulged dachshund. It had a done feet with a separate toe, like a Japanese tabi sock. Long adequate to strech a wearer’s thigh, it came with a cashmere garter attached. It was a many surprising sock we had ever seen, and yet it was tough to suppose it being ragged by anyone other than a bride in Lapland, Meret Oppenheim certainly would have approved.
The mutation of Birkenstock from a niche German health object into a tellurian conform code competence not have happened yet a impasse of a lady named Margot Fraser. Born in 1929 and lifted in Berlin, Fraser became a successful dressmaker in Bremen. But she felt mutilated in Germany, and by a early sixties she was married to an American and vital in Northern California.
Fraser suffered from feet pain, and, in 1966, on a outing behind to Germany, she bought a span of Madrid sandals. “All a exercises a alloy told me to do, like station on a phone book and grabbing it with my toes (which finished me feel like a favourite if we did it for 3 minutes), we did automatically with these sandals,” she writes in a 2009 book, “Dealing with a Tough Stuff.” Upon returning to a U.S., she contacted Karl Birkenstock and due importing his sandals. At a time, she writes, “all women’s boots were slight and had forked toes. Even a supposed healthy boots still had heels. Because millions of women in a United States had unpleasant feet, we suspicion it would be easy to get them into this miraculous footwear.”
When shoe-store managers told her that a sandals would never sell, a crony suggested that she put adult a counter during a health-food gathering in San Francisco. Her beginning business were a owners of health-food stores, who spent all day on their feet; they started stocking Birkenstocks on their shelves alongside granola and vitamins. Fraser, who is eighty-five, told me recently that a shoe-store managers who had deserted her began vagrant her for sandals. “They came to me saying, ‘Look, there is a health-food store on my street, and people are walking out with shoeboxes—they should be walking out of my store with shoeboxes.’ ” Like a Earth shoe, that emerged from Scandinavia in a early seventies, and had a presumably health-giving figure in that a heel crater was reduce than a toe, Birkenstocks became compared with a counterculture.
Since then, Birkenstocks have been cyclically fashionable. In 1990, Kate Moss seemed in an enormously successful widespread in a repository The Face; she was graphic holding a half-smoked cigarette and wearing a relaxed sweater, a bikini bottom, and a span of Birkenstock sandals. Moss’s demeanour prefigured a brand’s wider welcome in a early nineties, when Birkenstocks were interconnected with plaid shirts and grandma dresses. Before Phoebe Philo’s surrealist reinvention, Birkenstock’s prior runway epitome came in 1992, when Marc Jacobs used them in his scandalous grunge collection, for Perry Ellis.
The confidant tastes of a American consumer shabby a prolongation in Germany, Fraser told me, yet infrequently her ideas met with resistance: “When we started to ask for color, a male who had to discharge a sandals in Switzerland said, ‘This lady is going to hurt us. We are orthopedic—we don’t need color.’ But we brought tone into a United States, and it helped sales everywhere.”
In Germany, it is widely believed that a organisation insole promotes a healthier foot—a self-assurance mostly common by American podiatrists when prescribing orthotics. American consumers, however, have been conditioned by sneaker settlement to associate comfort with cushioning. In 2000, Birkenstock introduced to America sandals with a feet bed that incorporated an additional covering of cushioning: a pillow-top mattress for a feet.
Twice a year, a boots buyers of America transport to a Las Vegas Convention Center to attend FN Platform, a three-day trade uncover that bills itself as “The Global Showcase for Branded Footwear.” Sixteen hundred shoe brands exhibited during a uncover in February, among them Birkenstock. At a company’s booth, we met David Kahan, who, given 2013, has run Birkenstock’s American division. Kahan, a trim, jaunty male of fifty-four, with a salesman’s assured and accessible manner, was formerly a conduct of Rockport Shoes. Margot Fraser had been late for 8 years when Kahan took over; her depart was followed by a duration of turmoil, with a fast turnover of leadership, and disappointment on a partial of retailers. “There was no inventory, it was unequivocally tough to replenish, and unequivocally tough to get product,” Robert Goldberg, a boss of Harry’s Shoes, on a Upper West Side, told me. Under Kahan, Birkenstock USA is now “a well-oiled machine,” Goldberg says.
In Las Vegas, Kahan had interconnected a large navy fit with black leather Birkenstock dried boots. “Rockport didn’t make a bad shoe, yet these blow divided anything they had,” Kahan told me. He had customarily finished a assembly with a customer from Nordstrom, one of a company’s many critical clients, and had been gay to see that a customer was wearing black Arizona Exquisites. “Anyone can have a prohibited item—boat boots are hot, board sneakers are hot,” he said. “But this is about being a code that is on a opposite level.” He looked down a aisle during his adjacent venders. “They are all offered shoes, and one person’s boots are fundamentally a same as another person’s shoes. The customarily shoe where we can tell what it is from fifteen feet divided is a span of Birkenstock sandals,” he said. He nodded toward a lady flitting by in a span of crowd sandals. “What kind of shoe is she wearing? Who a ruin knows?”
Kahan explained that a boots and boots nearing in stores this tumble would still be tangible as Birkenstocks yet would gain on other trends in a marketplace. “I use ‘Birkenstock’ as a verb,” he said. “We did a sneaker bottom for spring—sneakers are a prohibited trend in a market, so we Birkenstocked it. We Birkenstocked Doc Martens; we Birkenstocked a motorcycle boot.” There was even a Birkenstocked Ugg: a fur-lined bootie with a ridged sneaker bottom and dual sandal-like leather straps opposite a foot. Kahan told me, “You go to Bergdorf’s and get in a elevator, somebody is going to demeanour down and go, ‘Where did we get them?’ That is a matter item.”
Inside a booth, sandals and boots were organised on shelves that were accessorized with vases of wheatgrass. A slim indication in black leggings and a lax black shirt was on call, and she slipped a sandal onto her ideally pedicured feet during a ask of a member of a sales staff, who were attending to a visiting buyers during half a dozen tiny tables. A store owners from a Midwest was being urged to try on a Boston jackass in a nontraditional color—zinfandel and tourmaline were a company’s newest offerings—while visitors from New York were being shown a latest styles in black. Among them was Zacky Joseph, who owns Zacky’s, on reduce Broadway. Joseph told me that a black Gizeh and a white Arizona were a best-selling Birkenstocks in his store; a sales deputy operative with him urged him to cruise also stocking a Florida, a three-strap sandal that conform editors had been arrangement an seductiveness in this season. Joseph favourite a Doc Martens-style boot, yet he was understandably doubtful about a Birkenstocked Ugg. “It’s window dressing,” he said. “We’ll get dual pairs.”
At another list sat Jonathan Skow, a engineer of Mr. Turk, a menswear line formed in California. He was selecting boots to element a brightly colored clothes—striped twill jackets, floral-patterned pants—for sale during a company’s boutique in Palm Springs. Arrayed before him were several sandals, including a black-on-black fur Arizona, and a brownish-red leather Zurich with a crêpe sole. The closed-toe boots and boots were not of sold seductiveness to him, he told me: “Our male is some-more social—going to bars, going to clubs, going to cooking parties, going to brunch. He doesn’t unequivocally go into a office. And he doesn’t go into a woods.”
Skow was wearing jeans and some garments of his possess design: a clear patterned shirt and a Black Watch plaid blazer. On his feet were black Arizona sandals. “I am a superfan,” he said. “I was in Morocco this summer, and a chicest demeanour was a white Birkenstock and a djellabah and Versace glasses. It was amazing. The guys looked great.” In his opinion, Birkenstocks were both gentle and good-looking. “What some-more can we ask for?” he said. “They give a tiny pizzazz to any outfit.”
In one dilemma of a booth, a few pairs of Birkenstock-branded hosiery were on display, yet not a cashmere fantasia I’d seen in Neustadt. Skow pronounced that he authorized of sandals with socks, yet he concurred that it was not to everyone’s taste. “I am fifty-two, and we have been a kooky, kooky dresser given a eighties, and we don’t cruise I’ve ever had some-more people glance during me than walking by Paris in Birkenstocks in socks,” he said. Birkenstocks always generated clever emotions. After posting about them on his Facebook page, he had perceived extensive denunciations in response. “But that is what conform is about,” he said. “That’s what creates things interesting—when we demeanour during something, and we aren’t certain if we like it or not.” ♦