Stop Trying to Make Crocs Happen, London Fashion Week!
I remember the first time I read that Birkenstocks were officially cool. Why was it suddenly okay to wear these horrendous hippie shoes? Even more mind-boggling, why was it okay to wear them with SOCKS?! Nothing could be worse than this, right? Wrong.
For some reason, English designer Christopher Kane decided to send his models down the runway at London Fashion Week wearing—shudder—CROCS. The clunky pieces of rubber distracted the audience from the rest of the collection, which consisted of beautiful lace skirts and sheer dresses. But wait, there’s more! They weren’t just regular crocs. They were bejeweled Crocs, consisting of crystals, applied in the same way that children “Jibbitz” to theirs, shaped in cartoons such as Dora the Explorer.
I understand Fashion Week shows aren’t meant to be taken totally seriously, and London Fashion Week is particularly quirky. I went to ~fashion school~. I know these things. But at what brainstorming meeting did the design team think that this was a good idea? Most importantly, what suckers are going to fall for this trend? I hope not you!
Many designers use their power to execute large scale fashion faux-pas, and then watch those mistakes spread, like blight. “Well, if it was a trend at fashion week, I can do it,” says potential innocent fashion bystander. It’s a known fact that high fashion trickles down. This phenomenon is best explained in The Devil Wears Prada, when Miranda Priestly teaches fashion newb Andy that virtually everything that ends up in her closet has been decided by a designer up on high, whether she realizes it or not. Her cerulean sweater that she picked up in a “tragic” clearance bin was the end result of a 2002 Oscar de la Renta collection which featured gowns in the same hue.
So, herein lies the problem. If this, too, is susceptible to the trickle down fashion effect, the same way that Birkenstocks or dad-sandals and all the other normcore shit did, it is possible that Crocs could soon be EVERYWHERE. Ok, maybe that is hyperbole but, at least that sentence could realistically end in “on thousands more feet.” And that is still very scary. In that scenario, they would show up on display on mannequins at Zara, H&M, Forever 21, and even Wal-Mart. From there, people may flock to that god-forsaken, unnecessarily gigantic Crocs flagship store on 34th street.
There are only two groups of people in this world that should be allowed to wear Crocs, and those two groups are nurses who are on their feet all day and senior citizens with foot problems. Nobody else. I don’t care if Christopher Kane has deemed them to be cool. Just because something has been showcased on a runway, that doesn’t make it okay. (Marc Jacobs, we’re looking at you).
No designer in the world could convince me that Crocs are cool, and if Anna Wintour ever allows them to appear on the pages of Vogue, I, and fashion enthusiasts everywhere, will cry. But at least we’ll look way better than the fools wearing Crocs.
#MakeFashionWeekGreatAgain
Lead image via @Crocs