Sneakers/Trainers

Sneakers, or trainers as they are called in Britain, are shoes that are a product of particular consumer histories grounded in youth, sports, and subcultures. They are central to debates about the shifting meanings of fashion, popular culture, and consumption in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

A type of shoe that developed from sporting wear created in the late-nineteenth century, sneakers now represent vastly different spectra of class and national identities, as well as fashion mind-sets and subcultural affiliations. Generalizations about sneaker-wearers and sneaker-wearing tend to focus on complaints about lazy or casual dressing, inappropriate attire for the aging, or exploitative conditions of production. Yet this article of attire, a truly global phenomenon, is now ubiquitous and omnipresent. Something that was simply “casual wear” can now be pursued as a “classic.” Public figures as different as the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld and Prince William, heir to the British throne, appear in public in sneakers. A category of hybrid shoes has also developed for both men and women, in which more conventional looking business shoes incorporate the heel and soft cell design of certain runners that were designed for sports or jogging. The prominence of such shoes raises questions concerning the role of fashion within liberal democracy. Do they [Page 1297]offer endless choice, or few choices and an abrogation of taste and discrimination?

Sports shoes, trainers, runners, joggers, baskets, kicks, and shits are just some of the words used to denote what is widely known as the sneaker; one of the most dynamic areas within contemporary design. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the word sneaker as a North American term for “a soft shoe worn for sports or casual occasions.” In most cases, a rubber sole would be essential, but beyond these broad parameters it is nearly impossible to generalize about what constitutes a sneaker. Sneakers emerged from the rise of leisure in late-nineteenth-century life, particularly North American life. As the design historian Gregory Votolato has argued, in the purchase of cheap mass-produced garments, many newly created for a segmented market in which youth and leisure were new forces, people tried to create a better world for themselves.

The question of what constitutes the first sneaker is a matter of contention among experts. The more common view, upheld by design historians such as Alison Gill, is that sneakers were first produced during the latter half of the nineteenth century in England and America when the vulcanization process, whereby rubber is hardened to make tires, was applied to strengthen the area between the canvas upper and a rubber sole. These shoes, worn for activities such as croquet, tennis, and boating, were known as croquet sandals, sandshoes, and plimsolls, although as early as 1870 the word sneaker was being used in North America to refer to the little noise they produced when wearing them. The sports listed here were middle- or upper-class activities, and this is an indication that the class dimension of a material artifact such as a shoe shifts over time. The auditory dimension is significant too, as shoes in the early modern period were frequently characterized by tapping heels or heavy leather soles. Nancy Rexford's research into North American material culture shows that the distinct association between youth and rubber-soled canvas shoes was already evident in America as early as 1900.

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