Inside the Kingdom of Kicks How sneakers brought about the conquest of the casual at a price

We take our first steps in tiny Keds, our last in silver sneakers. In between, we shove our feet into kicks more often than ever before. In 1985, Cybill Shepherd wore orange Reebok Freestyles to the Emmy Awards for shock value, but this spring, nobody said boo when Adam Sandler showed up in Under Armour Curry 11s.

In one short century, sneakers have become the most common footwear on Earth. And our choice tells people who we are—or who we think we are. Or wish we were. Or want to become.

I ask an old friend what her sneakers mean to her. She is deep into political worry and snaps, uncharacteristically, “I’m not sure what the color of sneakers has to do with the rest of my life.” Actually, I want to say, rather a lot. Sneakers are a microcosm. Or maybe the word is homunculus: a little canvas and rubber creature that contains our ideal self.

“I can still smell the leather Keds I used to have that had red stitching to look like a baseball,” another friend reminisces. “Man, I loved those.”

A third goes for retro cool with his old-school Vans, admitting they make him feel “young and powerful! Ageless and energetic!”

The next friend sends a photo, gold and gorgeous: “This is called Chinese New Year, by Puma…. They make me feel happy, vibrant, 100 percent myself. Because they’re unapologetically a bit too much, but still just right. When I wear them, I am all the more comfortable in my own skin and equally unapologetic.”

Another does apologize, sending me a picture of a pair so worn out, she keeps them only to paint in. “The insoles are long gone, and there’s a heel hole in the padding!”

What else do we keep until it is this worn, this well-loved? A toddler’s blankie or a dog’s favorite toy, not much else. If someone you love dies, there will be nothing more tenderly, heartbreakingly intimate than their oldest pair of sneakers. Shoes that dashed them through rainstorms, won and lost games, bounced with eager impatience, knotted stubborn in airport security lines. They have been stretched and pounded into a shape no manufacturer ever envisioned. They smell of sweat and earth and freedom.

Sanctioned

Sanctioned stl is low lit but rainbow bright, with neon and pastel colorways slanted or stacked on every shelf. Like penny candy but worth a whole lot more. This collective boasts the largest selection in the Midwest, snatched up from footwear stores early every Saturday. The three managers are standing at the center of the store, heads bent toward Nike’s latest release: black metallic Jordan 5s, back for the first time in a decade.

Their eyes flicker when I approach—I am not their typical customer—but they smile, used to the unlikely. Scarcity tends to smash templates. One of the three, Bennett Range, recalls a woman in her seventies who managed to snag the only pair of size thirteen Flu Games (the shoe worn by Michael Jordan when he was dog-sick but scored forty-nine points anyway) for her grandson. An unwitting janitor had let her in a back entrance before the mall opened, and when security came to remove her, the other customers insisted she be allowed to stay first in line.

If these guys had to explain sneakerhead passion to a Martian? “I’d just tell them the story of whoever’s behind the shoe—the way they have left their mark on basketball or pop culture,” Range offers. Because despite the infinite variation and fanatical attention to detail, sneakers are really about celebrity. Excellence, if you prefer. Coolness, as lived by someone else.

Manager Cam Williams glances at a shoe someone is holding and says, “That colorway came from when they lost to the Bulls in ’96.” He waits a beat. “I cried.”

All three managers say that every morning, they “base the outfit off the shoes,” first deciding which sneakers to wear, then adding a matching hat, or a jersey the right color, or a pocket chain if there is a chain on the shoes. Socks are tricky: they must never be low with high tops, and Range will not go monochrome—he likes contrast—while Williams shudders at the thought of white socks with an all-black shoe.

My eye falls on a classic skateboarder’s shoe, white with dark green stripes. This is the sort of shoe I have always wanted, not the peach, pink, turquoise, and violet mishmash aimed at women. “So are these as comfortable as—” I avoid Range’s eyes—“HOKAs?” I have to own it. I own them, two pair. Hate how they look, but my feet are spoiled for cush.

Range shakes his head. No, they are not as comfortable as HOKAs. “But you look down at HOKAs, it looks like you’re wearing marshmallows.”

They also feel like you are wearing marshmallows. “How did anybody move in those early sneakers?” I ask, imagining the feel of thin soles hard as plywood and canvas edges sharp as a schoolteacher’s tongue. He shakes his head again, no clue.

We have cushioned ourselves. Perhaps too much.

(Original public domain image from Flickr)

What am I doing here?

Snaking through Sanctioned’s aisles, I come over cold: what am I doing here? My sneakers have never been the cool ones. I will move from HOKAs to granny kicks without once tasting a championship. The only time I played basketball, my friends told me what part of the court to guard—and I stood right there for the next ten minutes. Guarding.

Also, I have no heroes. Oh, maybe a few writers and thinkers, but all that is out of fashion now, and the athletes who lent these shoes their street cred are just names to me. Names and movement. I watch their coordination, speed, and grace with dropped jaw and know I have not earned the right to wear their name. I looked down on people who swooned over jocks, reciting every stat as though the accomplishment were their own. But the way these guys’ eyes light up when they talk about certain games, the obstacles and the miracles? I can see how that could be a playbook for the rest of life. How it could infuse courage and drama, reminding you what a human being can do in the last two minutes.

Like the nation itself, though, these democratic, Horatio Alger shoes are not, anymore. The coolest are elitist. You have to know certain things, feel certain things, to wear them righteously. I will need my friend Steve Friedman, a writer who has chronicled many athletes’ triumphs and tragedies, including his own. Not only does he keep landing in Best American Sports Writing, but he brought a pro’s dedication to pickup games on asphalt. He started playing basketball at twelve, and at thirty-seven, he was “still playing one to three hours a day, just about every day, for school teams, city leagues, Salvation Army leagues, intramural leagues, whatever.” Nearly always in high-top black Converse that, back in the day, “cost $10 a pair, and would usually have holes in them by the end of a summer.” His feet rashed and blistered—once he wound up in the E.R. But “the notion of ‘high performance’ basketball shoes was not something people thought about,” he says. “Maybe some people wore Adidas and Nike, but if you played basketball, you just wore some shoes you could play basketball in.”

Sneakers reimagined; Nike at Sanctioned (photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

Steve can list the turning points: the 1979 NCAA final between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird that reignited interest in college basketball and then, when they entered the NBA, in pro basketball. Their commercials for Converse, which made the shoes cool even off the court. Then the big one: Nike’s Michael Jordan campaign. “I do remember, when I was in my twenties, thinking, ‘Okay, I’ll try one of these newfangled ‘high-performance’ shoes,’” says my friend the late adapter. “I have to admit, they are much, much better than my high top black Converse. But when Converse became fashionable, I was sort of sullen and resentful, like, ‘Hey, I loved country before country was cool.’”

Sneaker evolution

It is 1880, and every day you must lace or button hot, hard-soled leather onto your feet. You try to walk lightly, which is not only less clunky but less painful. You are sedate even when you play croquet, the new craze. Secretly, you live for bedtime, when you can raise your tiered skirt or hoist a pant leg and remove the heavy cladding from your swollen, aching feet.

Luckily, Charles Goodyear is concerned about what your hard, spiked croquet soles are doing to the grass. At a soiree, you hear thrilling gossip: Mr. Goodyear has finally managed to vulcanize rubber! Croquet sandals will have soft, squishy soles! You rush to buy a pair, then lace the cool canvas uppers and step outside. A deliciousness flutters through you. They are as springy as new lambs! They make you want to do impolite things, like bounce or run. What a shame the maid cannot afford a pair—they would no doubt give her a boost. But they are $6! (Which is, in today’s money, $187, about what people still pay for premium sneakers—whether they can afford to or not.)

Mass production ramps up, and by 1900, “sneakers” can be had for 60 cents at Sears, Roebuck. The nickname comes from those stealthy rubber soles, as suitable for crime as for croquet. In 1916, the Champion is released by Keds, only to be upstaged by the Converse All Star, which has snazzy reinforced leather strips to anchor the lacing.

That shoe will monopolize the basketball court for the next half century.

Chuck Taylor wears the All Star when he plays semi-pro for the Firestone Non-Skids. Then he suggests a few design tweaks and starts traveling the country selling the shoes. By 1923, the Chuck Taylor All Stars carry his signature on their star.

Everybody wears Chuck Taylors, just like they all watch The Ed Sullivan Show and take their news from Walter Cronkite, so the shoes are not an identity quest. Nor is there an acquisitive fever, because the Chuck Taylors never change. Collecting them would make no sense.

The classic Converse Chuck Taylors (Rawpixel)

After those simple, unselfconscious Champions and Chucks, though, sneakers develop heroic ambitions. ASICS is an acronym for the Latin ideal Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a sound mind in a sound body. Puma is the Quechua word for cougar. Hoka is Maori and means “to fly over the earth.” And Nike is the winged goddess of victory.

While the humble canvas Converse, Keds, and Vans sneak out of the gym to stay up late with the Ramones, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain, the athletic variations multiply. Adidas leather basketball sneakers, Puma suede, then Nike takes the spotlight with super-lightweight Waffle Trainers. By the eighties, sneakers are taking their cue from three young, male-dominated tribes: the casuals (English soccer fans), the hip hop circles of the South Bronx, and the skateboarders of Southern California.

That bit of anthropological observation comes from former b-ball pro Bobbito Garcia, whose sneakerhead cred is so impeccable, seven Air Force 1s bear his name. Nostalgia burns through Where’d You Get Those?—his homage to eighties sneaker mania. He writes about Run DMC performing, their Adidas unlaced, tongues out and thirsty. Sneakers now as culture. Sneakers prized and yearned for. “I worked a newspaper route when I was nine and saved up for a month to buy $35 Dr. J.s.,” a guy named Serch tells Garcia. “My mom was real angry because that was a lot of paper. The leather cracked on me crazy, so my man Tito told me to put baby oil on them.”

In Garcia’s honed opinion, sneakers produced after ’87 are, “with few exceptions, over-designed and straight-up ugly.” Earlier styles look sleeker, cleaner, and classier by comparison. By the early ’90s, Japanese buyers are paying up to 1,000 percent (that third zero is not a typo) for vintage U.S. sneakers. The Beastie Boys, already an exception in the eighties because they wore their Pumas and Adidas scuffed up, become aficionados, buying up U.S. vintage now curated in overseas shops every time they travel. They tie the aesthetic to their music: “We have a certain respect for a certain era of utilitarian design,” Mike D. announces. “The stuff that we lean towards doesn’t happen to be in production today.”

Following their fans’ lead, companies start making retro styles, but they can only spin retreads for so long. In need of new products, they turn to tech. Nike puts air pockets in the Tailwind’s sole for extra cushioning. Adidas adds a flexible torsion bar. Reebok inserts a pump in the tongue, inflating an air cushion to hug your foot. ASICS adds gel inserts for shock absorption. Adidas adds an on-board computer to track distance and pace. Nike uses shock-absorbing tubes to let you “spring back,” powered by the energy released as your foot pressed down. Sneakermakers start embedding sensors. Adidas uses a new chemical process to keep the shoe steady from four degrees below zero to 104F. Nike releases the Vaporfly, whose carbon-fiber plates and thick foam sole can increase running efficiency by 5 percent. The short-lived Nike Adapt comes with a smartphone app that tightens the laces for you and a gear train that senses tension in your foot.

First they were shoes, then they were cars, then computers, now robotic butlers, trainers, masseuses. Every year, higher performance, more comfort. Shoes more and more garish, complicated, extra. I blink hard as I read about integrated Kansei engineering, used with artificial neural networks to construct a topological feature map for sneakers. “The form of the sole in running shoes is the most significant design factor that affects consumers’ emotional responses,” notes an article in Computers & Industrial Engineering. Well of course it is. The sole is where we touch the ground. Or, we hope, float just above the ground.

The engineers used a self-organizing map and output fifty sneakers as neurons. Do I have that right? It sounds like sneakers becoming part of our brains.

Ah, but that happened a long time ago.

Storytelling

Chuck Taylor was the first name, but Michael Jordan was the first story.

In 1984, Nike signed an unknown kid, gangly and earnest, to an endorsement deal. He laced up his new Nikes and made Rookie of the Year. If you were alive, you had just witnessed what was “arguably the birth of modern sneaker culture.”

Jordan swished point after point in his AJ1s. But he did not have happy feet.

“Michael Jordan hates the Jordan 1,” Range tells me, as though whispering a confidence. “It’s uncomfortable.” When, in a burst of nostalgia, Jordan put on an old pair for what he thought would be his final game at Madison Square Garden with the Chicago Bulls, his socks were soaked in blood by halftime. Rueful, Jordan said he had paid the price for trying to return to 1984.

Feet acclimate to comfort, same as the rest of us. Nike hastily added more cushioning and padding to the Jordan 2, but Michael threatened to leave because the second shoe was so damned ugly. Range picks one up to show me. “See? It’s bulky, not stylish. And Nike moved the wings from the collar to the tongue”—which even to me reads as less cool.

The Jordan 3 makes Michael stay—and he lasts through nine more iterations. His most famous choice, though, is wearing his black and red Air Jordan 1s on the court—a brazen act, as the shoe is not 51 percent white. (Or do they mean White?) The NBA fines him for his rebellion. Delighted, Nike pays the $5K fine and writes a new ad: “The NBA can’t keep you from wearing them.” Years later, when Nike re-releases the “BRed” colorway, it will be labeled “Banned.”

Air Jordans are famous, first for what they let Michael do, and second for the ways Nike stitched them to his story. Details stayed faithful: by the time the AJ5 is “reimagined” and re-released, it has white laces as a nod to the way he wore his, and “a fierce stance inspired by MJ’s on-court dominance and high-flying style.” The shoes are meant to be inseparable from his magic; maybe they are even its potion? In 1989, Nike produced ads in which Spike Lee’s character spots Jordan and calls, “Yo, Money, is it the shoes?” Because if it is, then you can put them on and get some of that for yourself.

Nike Air Jordans (Rawpixel)

The sneaker killings, a succession of young men killing other young men just to steal their shoes, turned Spike Lee’s line sour. It was the shoes. Those nine killings ground in the stereotypes, linking violent crime and mindless materialism to young Black men obsessed with sneakers. Yet theses were the same guys that coolhunting consumer researchers spied on, pre-Internet, to find the next style trend they could sell to suburban America.

“A sneaker is not born great; it becomes great,” writes Mathieu Le Maux. “How? By becoming part of the story of a sportsperson, an artist, a trend, or a cultural movement.”

In 1993, intending to retire, Michael Jordan signs his AJ VIIIs “Our LAST F-ing Game” and writes the score of the Bulls’ win along the toe. When he returns in 1995 and resuscitates the Chicago Bulls, he wears the Jordan XI Concord.

Today, there are so many hero shoes. LeBrons, Durants, Kobes, Hardins, Anthony Edwardses, LaMelo Balls. Storylines for each. But the coupling is as tricky as humans are fallible. Nike has had to drop Michael Vick (dogfighting), Manny Pacquiao (homophobic comments), Adrian Peterson (child abuse) and Oscar Pistorius (murder charges). Meanwhile, even the brightest stars fade from memory. Kids are buying AJs without ever having seen him play. With age and time, coolness fades.

When Sen. Cory Booker set a new record with his impassioned twenty-five-hour speech on the Senate floor, he wore a pair of black HOKA Clifton One9s.

Provocations

Ever see somebody show up to a board meeting in red sneakers? “The Red Sneakers Effect” is marketing code for nonconformist behavior. Which, researchers conclude, can “lead to inferences of enhanced status and competence.” Red shoes in general telegraph extremes: European nobles wore red heels, women who can afford them wear red-soled Christian Louboutin heels, Roman Catholic cardinals wear red leather slippers. Sex, sin, power. And when the red shoes are sneakers, that adds a note of youth, nimbleness, provocation.

Ever see a pair of sneakers tied together and tossed over a power line? Authorities puzzled over that ritual for years. Was it a sign of gang activity? A rite of passage? A free ad saying drugs are available here? A sign that someone was killed, “knocked the fuck out of his shoes,” at this spot? Cops can never be sure.

It is 1968, The Olympics, Mexico City. Americans are sweeping in track and field. Tommie Smith wins the gold and John Carlos the bronze in the 200-meter dash. They bow their heads to accept their medals—and then, as “The Star Spangled Banner” plays, they set aside their personal victories to raise black-gloved hands, fists clenched in protest. Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated, and the fight for civil rights has reached a crescendo. The athletes unlace their Puma Suedes to stand on the platform in black socks, symbolizing Black poverty. They know how many kids like them go barefoot. The U.S. Committee hurriedly, nervously apologizes for this “discourtesy” and bans Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village. Puma later releases limited editions of the Puma Suede in their honor.

It is 2005, and artist Judi Werthein is handing sneakers to people in Tijuana who are trying to cross the border illegally. She will sell the same shoes in a San Diego boutique for $215. They are designed to carry a map, flashlight, and compass in their inner sole, as well as pockets to hide money and medicine. On the back of the shoe, seen as they flee, is an image of Santo Toribio Romo, the patron saint of Mexican migrants. Werthein arranged to have the shoes manufactured in China, replicating U.S. footwear companies’ pattern of abandonment at home and exploitation abroad.

2012: Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer—who, like Converse, is 104 years old—designs a line that contains hidden human rights slogans and symbols, with references to the Landless Workers’ Movement on the lining.

2016: After New Balance publicly approves Trump’s protectionist trade policies, a neo-Nazi blog declares New Balance “the official shoes of white people”—and no doubt means it as a compliment. People promptly stuff their NBs in public toilets or light them afire.

2023: Taofeek Abijako of the design studio Head of State uses his Nike sponsorship for a group exhibit, bringing in other artists who are wrestling with issues of heritage, immigration, and the concept of home. One of his Nike prototypes is made from a cowrie shell print, a nod to his parents’ roots in West Africa, where these shells were once currency. The shoe’s sole is extra thick, because his father kept his money in the sole of one shoe when he crossed the desert to escape Nigeria. Planning to sail illegally to Spain, he grew homesick and turned around. Then his U.S. visa was approved.

2025: The real provocation is the collateral damage, human and environmental. Until recently, the main part of most sneakers was stitched by hand, often in overseas sweatshops. Manufacturing moved from South Korea to Taiwan, China, Thailand, then Indonesia, then Viet Nam, leaving trash behind every time. Which made it hard for Nike to sound sincere when it introduced the Native N7, a reference to the indigenous seventh-generation philosophy that considers any decision’s impact on the next seven generations. The shoes were supposedly designed for the native American foot, which was believed to be extra wide in front. “The first thing I did was, I laughed until I cried,” said Sherman Alexie, a Native American writer.

In today’s climate, shoes dare not even try to be diverse. Will they still try to be green? So far, manufacturers have given us mainly whimsy. Nike made its Space Hippie entirely from factory scraps. Adidas made Parley from recycled ocean plastic. If you bury a Reebok’s Cotton + Corn, shoe, it will, like an uncoffined corpse, slowly return to nature.

Buyers barely notice. This spring, Nike shareholders voted down a proposal to join binding agreements to better address human rights and fair pay in high-risk countries. At last check, Nike CEO John Donahoe’s compensation was $29.2 million. After all, ten years ago, the global sneaker market was worth $48.1 billion. Last check, it was $94.1 billion.

After going cheap with mass production, sneakers crowd-surfed youth culture, got cool and used that subcultural cachet to raise its price points again, then exploded into a thousand variations tailored to particular market niches.

Even women.

For centuries, men used sports, like battle, to feel like men. Aggressive, competitive, unfettered. Now crowds gather to watch women shoot hoops or play soccer, and sneakermakers are doing their best to be gender fluid. But history weighs them down.

I ask an AI what women’s sneaker preferences are. It tells me what sneakers women prefer on men.

In the evolution of the sneaker, women are cast as appreciators and helpmeets. Charles Goodyear’s breakthrough came after he used his wife’s rolling pin to knead raw rubber pliable. Trainer Bill Bowerman poured rubber into his wife’s waffle iron, cheerfully ruining it, to make a three-dimensional lattice sole with traction. After making lasts by burning Buddhist candles and pouring their hot wax on his feet, Kihachiro Onitsuka’s design was still too slippery. Disheartened, he went to his mom’s for dinner, and she served him a cold cucumber and octopus salad. There, at the bottom of the bowl, he found his solution. Prying off a tiny piece of octopus that was stuck to the ceramic, he studied the suction cups he would mimic.

Fresh kicks and retreads

Drenched by a storm, the first thing my mother did was wipe down her new white Tretorns. I laughed so hard I doubled over. “Uncool,” I said when I had finally caught my breath. “Stuff is supposed to look old, messy, experienced.” I wore my sneakers to hell and back. Once I snapped a photo of our cocker spaniel puppy draped over the top of one, sound asleep. Those grayed, frayed laces; the warped ripple of the eyelets; the yellowed rubber and faded canvas…that shoe was almost as cute as the puppy.

Alas, I married a man who also likes bright white sneakers. I tell him they make him look like Minnie Mouse. He lifts one eyebrow and informs me that Minnie wore red shoes. Easy mistake, I say: bright white attracts the eye, making the shoes look as clunky as hers did on those skinny black legs.

I am feeling clever until I see the total revenue from white sneakers: $15 billion, slated to increase by 20 percent by 2028. All-white sneakers are cool. And they do need to stay bright white. Back in the golden eighties, even guys as swag as Jay-Z carried shower caps to protect their shoes from a sudden rainstorm. Gum tape went on the hem of their jeans to keep the denim from staining white kicks. If you managed to cop a pair of rust-on-tan Puma Clydes, you kept two toothbrushes in your back pocket. Soon the old ritual of “baptism,” or “stepsies,” stomping on somebody’s new shoes, begged for a black eye.

Sanctioned customers will wear the all-white Air Force 1 “one or two times,” Range says. “They’ll say, ‘If it gets dirty, I gotta deep clean it or give it to Goodwill. I need it crispy white.” He deep-cleans his shoes, too, and in rain, he wears his New Balance beaters.

Nike sells crispy white. But Nike also sells battered, because when you tie yourself to trends, you move like a Slinky, forward in full-circle loops. Rather than abandon its cult classics, Nike has Reimagined them, adding a little new design and fake wear. The Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “Lost and Found” had its own plotline, starting with a beat-up old shoebox with a mismatched lid, found in a stock room thirty-seven years later.

Inside was a yellow paper receipt from Sandy Bros., looking just as it would have before computers hit retail. The aesthetic was deadstock: a pair of shoes found on the back of a shelf decades later, its leather waxy and slightly, artificially cracked; signs of “wear” at the ankle collar; laces faded (to avoid the fashion atrocity of threading new laces through old shoes); a light coating of fabricated, permanent “dust” on the soles. The bright white midsole has yellowed to elephant tusk.

You might expect me to love them, but I hate cheating.

Collecting

Certain sneakers are so sought-after and celebrated, as an art form and a pop culture trophy, that people have stopped wearing them. They stay boxed—or in a limited edition Nike MAG plutonium display case, its price up 5,430 percent to $9,900. In a financial emergency, they can be sold like gold bars. Resale is now a $10.6 billion global industry with its own stock market, StockX. There are sneaker cons—Snkrfest, It’s Got Sole, SneakerCon, the KickBack—scattered around the country for trade and resale. And there is another con, the criminal sort, with sneaker fiends using bots to buy multiple pairs of shoes during limited releases. In minutes, they can drain a store’s inventory, then sell the shoes at a huge profit.

Now that we get our kicks online, the collecting market is a wacky EKG of jagged ups and downs. During COVID, thanks to boredom, stimulus checks, and a desire to outrun death and disease, sneaker sales boomed. Then fell, then rose, then fell. This is maddening for collectors, because as with any artful, emotionally charged object, it is easy to tip into obsession. “Our owner has 2,800 pair,” Range volunteers, adding dryly, “It’s a problem. He has more shoes than are in this building.”

There are limited production runs for Holy Grail sneakers, just as there are for Picasso lithographs. Try finding a Nike Air Force 1 Mr. Cartoon. But beware. The Pony chevron, the Converse chevron and star, the Puma stripe, the Adidas stripes, the Pro-Ked double stripe with a point, the Spalding triple wings, the Bata triangle, the Nike swoosh—these logomarks are so well known, with such immediate visual power, that they are easy to fake. For 2023, the counterfeit market was estimated at $600 billion—sixty times as high as the legit resale market. Sneaker forgery is such a problem, tech had to be invented to spot the counterfeits.

Self-expression

I just wanted a little holiday from the chaos that passes for U.S. politics these days, a chance to think about something frivolous and fun. What did I find? An icon that started with the rich, went cheap with mass production, made acquisition imperative, then jacked up its price again. An icon that used to be a shared, casual norm, everybody in their Converse sneaks, then fractured into tribal competition among dozens of brands aimed at different demographics. A male-centric icon that still has not managed to aim equally at women. An icon that elevated good design, then was made ugly by excess tech and gimmickry. An icon that racked in billions with cheap labor and environmental exploitation. An icon that became a symbol of status, then got stolen for use as a symbol of social justice; that turned cool in the subcultures, then got stolen by the luxury makers.

An icon, in other words, quintessentially American. Which means quintessentially conformist and individualistic at once. Sneakers conspire to announce athleticism, coolness, masculinity, simplicity, race, class or aspiration, personality. It took me a long time to care—but I seem to be living in reverse. These days it is the fun I focus on, the playful gear and what it signifies and makes possible. I can run in sneakers, or jump up and down. In a time when the grownups are either worried sick or angry, escaping gravity seems the most useful skill of all.

I never dreamed this would happen half a century ago, when I was paralyzed by the terror of high school P.E., all of us “dressing out” in red elastic-legged bloomers so hideous, the shoes did not matter. My first clue came in, natch, the eighties, at a black-tie fundraiser called The Tennis Shoe Ball. There we were, all glammed up but with sneakers on our feet. We danced all night—no sinking exhausted into a chair and surreptitiously slipping off a heel to rub a bruised sole. Freedom of movement; freedom from vanity; freedom from pain.

Crazy, how shoes can change our mood. They change the length of our stride, the angle of our ankle, how we brake, how long we can stand, how far we can walk. In heels, we mince or strut; in thick heavy lug soles, we stomp; in sneakers, we bounce. A friend sees her shoes as activities: Ah, she will say, there are my pickleball sneakers, or my too-old-and-smart-for-heels city sneakers…. Sneakers are about moving, practicing, playing. Screen-drugged, we need them more than ever.

After the Boston Marathon massacre, though, I could not look at sneakers for a month. Boston magazine’s staff went out and got the shoes of hundreds of marathoners and photographed them for a last-minute cover, crowded together by color, the red ones on the inside, outlining the empty black shape of a heart at the center. The sight of those shoes—the thought of all that energy, hope, and resolve, obliterated—undid me.

I shake it off, distract myself with happier, sillier shoes. Nike’s nod to the Grateful Dead, as furry as the band’s bear. The Ben & Jerry’s homage, the Chunky Dunky, covered with black cow splotches. Customized shoes people color up wild, taking design into their own hands and telling their own heroic story.

Customization, like most good ideas, went corporate, sold as a bland craft with kits online and preset templates from the big manufacturers. But it still exists in more radical, creative indie forms.

The thought of people jazzing up their own shoes gets me so excited, I go home and dig out a humiliating pair of ugly-red Skechers I bought when I hurt one of my feet. Can even they be redeemed? (And if so, can I?) The glittery red elastic, I paint black, and part of the off-white sole becomes a wavy black stripe, and look at that, a BRed colorway, a sprinkle of magic on the life of an almost-old, sedentary White woman who jumps for nothing.

Sneakers are, after all, laced with fantasy.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.