The natural history of the trainer, or how the Green Flash plimsoll got soul

Stephen Bayley

NEWS of a 20Mhz interactive biomechanical trainer has us coveting not our neighbour's ass, but his shoes. “Life is mostly what you wear,” said a barefoot immigrant interviewed in the Depression. And what you wear is dense with meanings: some acquired, many borrowed, others stolen.

The trainer is only the latest in the history of apparel that has jumped the species barrier from specialist to mainstream. Shirts with buttondown collars were created for polo players. College boys in Connecticut opt to dress like long-distance truckers. Most boat shoes never see salt water. And then there were jeans. Originally miners' trousers from the Californian gold rush of ‘49, they migrated to the dude ranches of Arizona where effete West Coasters rediscovered their ethnic selves and brought the souvenir strides home. Here, as Tom Wolfe reported in his essay Funky Chic, the well-to-do who had no obvious connection with mining or ranching discovered the “raw-vital reverse-spin funk thrill” of wearing socially incongruous attire. Now trainers are worn by people whose concept of athleticism is bowing to trends.
More than 20 per cent of the British footwear market comprises trainers, which is to say shoes whose construction and style are based on the functional requirements of running. So how did a track shoe leap the hurdle and become a fashion staple? There are precedents. In the Sixties Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes, period pieces in white canvas with unstructured rubber soles whose only interactive characteristic was the generation of blisters, were occasionally worn outside the tennis club. Here they performed important acts of cultural modelling and social competition: tennis has forever been associated with firm thighs and breezy middle-class prosperity. Wear the shoes, get the effect.
Something similar happened with trainers. It was sociologists Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross who gave us the concept “early adopters”, the group who follow innovators and start a trend. They were studying the Iowa farmers’ acceptance of new corn seed. We are studying trainers whose early adopters were the pioneers of the gym.
Before 1980, gyms were malodorous dives, the haunts of boxers and worse. But 25 years ago, the gym was transformed into a recreational resource for pampered hedonists. Heaving and sweating musclebound tatooed brutes gave way to the trim, toned and tanned. And if you wore your sports shoes when you were no longer on the treadmill, then you advertised your status privileges. As Thorsten Veblen noted in his landmark study of consumerism, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “ The need of dress is eminently . . . a spirtual need.” Ah yes.
Two companies benefited from the spirituality of participative sports in the Eighties and Nineties. There was Nike, founded by serious runners in Portland, Oregon in 1966, and adidas, founded in Germany 45 years earlier. While leather Bannister-era trainers would last for many seasons, improving technology hastened the rate of change. And then the spurious dynamics of the fashion cycle set in. Your advanced synthetic AirMax might be technically indestructible, but the devils of competitive desire had been excited and last year’s model is redundant before it’s even dirty. The same demented psychology which in Detroit was known as “planned obsolescence” now affects the feet rather than tailfins.
This artificial stimulation of demand enraged the anti-corporate campaigner Naomi Klein, even as it delighted the ghetto customers she was protecting: Run-DMC’s 1987 My Adidas was a hymn, not a protest. The ghetto's appropriation of trainer style was richly ironic and very deft. The year after, Tom Wolfe, again, noted in The Bonfire of the Vanities that urban muggers wore Reeboks. And these inner citizens acquired a fabulous connoisseurship which the manufacturers were pleased to feed. Limited editions appeared. Classic models were revived. Precise measures of status were attributable to the length of a trainer tongue.
Nike now has a collaboration with Comme des Garçons and has lifted its restriction on selling only in sports shops. Puma has a new line intended to compete not in marathons but with Prada Sport, which makes trainers that make running technically impossible.
There is something absurd about the trainer phenomenon. As Ruskin knew, “every increased possession loads us with new weariness”. And possession of trainers is increasing. I bumped into Giorgio Armani in St Tropez the other day and he was wearing a very nice pair of brown suede trainers
from - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article419621.ece