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The Cool Kid Trinity: Vans, Chuck Taylors, and Doc Martens
Doc Martens 1460 boot
Not every popular shoe in the 1980s signified an acquisitive nature or a go-getter spirit. The black-and-white checkerboard slip-on sneaker by Vans remains one of the most recognizable shoes of the decade, thanks to the 1982 teen movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High and a pot-smoking slacker named Jeff Spicoli, played by the young, up-and-coming actor Sean Penn. Spicoli is the lovable loser who has “been stoned since the third grade,” orders a pepperoni pizza to be delivered to his history class, and wants nothing more out of life than “tasty waves and a cool buzz.” He’s so charmingly boneheaded that teenage audiences tried to emulate his laid-back Southern California style—and they especially wanted the checkerboard shoes he wore throughout the movie.
Fast Times was a defining pop-culture moment for Vans. As the brand gained a loyal following in Southern California, the Van Doren family noticed that kids who bought Vans liked to customize their sneakers with a DIY checkerboard pattern on the white sole. In response, Vans started manufacturing slabs of rubber with a checkerboard print and eventually, black-and-white-checked canvas. When the shoes ended up in Amy Heckerling’s high school comedy, Steve Van Doren, founder Paul’s son, credited Vans’ PR lady Betty Mitchell, and it wasn’t until 2009, when Mitchell was ninety-two years old, that he learned the real story. “Betty would hear about movies and she would bring shoes up to the [studios] and drop them off there. I always thought Betty dropped the first shoes over at Universal [where Fast Times was filmed] but she told me that actually Sean Penn went into our Santa Monica store [on his own] and bought a pair.” According to Van Doren, when the time came to work with the Fast Times costume department and outfit Spicoli, Penn said, hey, there’s a cool store [in Anaheim] and I got these checkerboard shoes and they’re pretty cool, and then after being contacted by Universal, Betty Mitchell sent shoes over to the wardrobe department. Fast Times went on to become a cult film, and it contained a particularly memorable advertisement for the Van Dorens’ company: when Jeff Spicoli, on a superstoned phone call with a surfing buddy, whacks himself on the head with a checkerboard slip-on, he has a prominently displayed Vans shoe box in his lap.
Steve Van Doren saw the moneymaking potential in the movie and brainstormed a slick way to promote the brand. He remembers: “My dad . . . I won’t say he’s cheap, but very thrifty. I said, ‘Dad, this movie is coming out, I know we don’t advertise but if you give me one thousand pairs of these checkerboard shoes, I will give them to every [radio] DJ in the country so that they play the sound track and get kids thinking about Fast Times.’ ” Every time a DJ played Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby” in the weeks leading up to the premiere, he or she would give away another pair of checkerboard Vans. The shoes became so closely affiliated with the film’s music that the cover of the original sound track featured a pair of them in a yellow-and-white-checked circle against a black background, with the band names listed on either side. “The seeds that we planted in the early 1980s are the roots of the company,” Steve Van Doren recalls fondly. In 2001, when Vans financed pro skateboarder Stacy Peralta’s documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys about the early days of the sport in Santa Monica, Steve Van Doren ran into Sean Penn—who narrated the film—on the red carpet.
“Because of all the kids who wanted to be Jeff Spicoli, you made my life easier, so thank you,” Van Doren told him.
At first, Spicoli-mania seemed to make sense as a reaction to stiff-collared corporate culture, but in some ways, the surf-dude’s appeal had roots in a similar overarching value: individualism. Jeff Spicoli is so appealing because he does what he wants (whether it’s order a pizza to fifth period or hotbox a bus before class), and he doesn’t let others’ expectations or rules bring him down. As a corporation, Vans needed to take a lesson from Spicoli’s playbook; just a year and a half after their unprecedented success with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, it filed for Chapter 11. As Steve Van Doren remembers it, the company felt pressure to create athletic shoes to keep up with brands like Nike and Reebok. Unfortunately, this caused Vans to drift too far out of its comfort zone and to gamble with the integrity of its product, thus losing the very skateboarders and surfers who had sworn by them, and not converting enough of the majority to make up for it. By the late 1980s, Van Doren and his father were able to bring the business back to life—paying “100 cents on the dollar,” he adds proudly—with a stronger sense of the company’s core identity.
By staying true to its original, and loyal, customer base—“skateboarders, surfers, BMX motocross people, [as well as] fashion for women in our realm,” according to Van Doren—Vans was able to weather the particularly stark transition between the 1980s and the 1990s, when nationwide priorities did an about-face, and the counterculture, which prides itself on its ability to react against the mainstream, suddenly found itself front and center. In the late 1980s, a burgeoning music scene in Washington would go on to shape a generation’s music tastes. Grunge was Seattle’s local answer to flashy mainstream rock-and-roll acts played in heavy rotation through MTV’s inaugural decade. Musically, it emerged from a blend of thrashing heavy metal and defiant punk rock, and it featured a stripped-down aesthetic typical to that area of the country. Whereas Kiss would spend hours getting decked out for their live performances, grunge acts would get drunk and high and stumble onto the stage in their unwashed flannel shirts. Initially, grunge music’s power came from its palpable sense of longing, disappointment, and antipathy—not, as it would eventually seem, from its sense of style. Later, when grunge became a fashion buzzword and suburban teens across the nation had adopted the northwestern look, Seattle natives would bemusedly shrug their shoulders and insist that their sartorial motives had always been strictly utilitarian. Flannel oxfords, knit caps, and heavy boots were weather appropriate and available secondhand for negligible prices at the Salvation Army. Grunge emerged from a chasm created by deprivation. In the 1980s, the difference between Seattle bands and the ones on MTV was plain: hair metal and new wave required costumes and thus money.
Eventually the Reagan recession that crippled Seattle would sweep the entire country, and grunge, for its fundamental sense of disenfranchisement, felt compellingly prescient. When the 1980s ended, the decade took off like a fun but entitled dinner guest who ordered champagne and caviar for the table, but then left without paying the bill. For Americans in the 1990s, the balance was due in the form of job losses, the Persian Gulf War, and AIDS, which as part of a public health campaign received nonstop edifying (yet scary) media attention. Suddenly, the marginalized freaks with their glassy eyes and greasy hair didn’t seem quite so off target. Grunge’s hammering guitar, reverberating bass, and whining vocals said everything the country couldn’t, and the self-described losers inherited the earth.
Two shoes eventually shod the all-stars of grunge: the Converse Chuck Taylor, and the Dr. Martens 1460 boot. The former had been strongly associated with a previous alternative scene in the United States. In the late 1970s, the company realized it had a solid foothold in youth culture and expanded beyond the original black-and-white color palette to produce Chuck Taylors in an assortment of candy colors. The fact that the canvas sneaker easily lent itself to further home customization—e.g., cutting, embroidering, or decorating—helped to secure it a place within the American punk rock scene. Menswear designer John Varvatos, whose collaboration with Converse began in 2002 and is currently contracted to continue until 2015, noticed that men and women alike wore Chuck Taylors when going to see bands like the Ramones, Blondie, and the Patti Smith Group in the late 1970s at CBGB (the groundbreaking club closed in October 2006, and music lover Varvatos himself now inhabits the space with an eponymous downtown boutique). As he tells it, grown-up former punk lovers who have gone on to pursue conventional careers—and buy correspondingly conventional wardrobes—still hold on to Converse sneakers as a souvenir of their defiant youth. “I have a friend in Hollywood,” Varvatos says, wearing his own pair of Chucks, “he’s probably fifty-eight years old. And when [the John Varvatos brand] started doing Converse shoes, he rediscovered them, and he wears them every single day, with his suits, with everything. And for him—he’s never told me this specifically, but I know it’s to show that he’s rebellious. He’s a pretty straightforward guy, but there’s this edge about him that he wants to be able to [project].” But what’s unique about Chuck Taylors, and what has ensured their enduring success, is their ability to filter through the generations without losing their cachet. Varvatos explains that his “son, [who] is twenty-five—I don’t think he’s ever gone a day without wearing Converse sneakers. And he wore them because he was pissed off as a kid and he was rebellious and he wanted to do everything that was anti, and that’s what’s interesting about what that brand represents. Whether you’re the fifty-eight-year-old guy or the fifteen-year-old kid, it’s your way of putting your own stamp on your personality, and [aligning yourself with] the counterculture.”
Somehow parents and their kids can both wear Converse sneakers without damaging the shoes’ credibility, and that’s due in part to the company’s decision to groom the Chuck Taylor as an “underground” shoe rather than push to widen its consumer base. It’s been a very long time since Converse was peddling the most technologically innovative basketball sneaker, but by the early 1990s they were no longer interested in that game. Instead the company realized they were rivaling other hipster brands like Puma and Vans. Then, a pop-culture coup: a black high-top Converse Chuck Taylor tapping along with grunge god Kurt Cobain’s guitar riff is the opening shot of the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Cobain himself was partial to Chuck Taylors, which signaled the presence of an outlier: someone who is paradoxically participating in fashion and tiptoeing outside of it, wearing shoes that have been culturally approved as cutting-edge.
Like Vans did, Converse realized that by muscling too far into the mainstream, the company would alienate its most loyal fan base and thus lose its grasp on that elusive coolness that keeps their shoes relevant. In 1994, the New York Times profiled Converse executive Baysie Wightman, who trolled “the clubs of New York, Tokyo and London . . . the rock-and-roll bars of Seattle and Portland [and] the streets of Los Angeles”—all “in search of hip feet.” Her strategy was to observe the footwear worn by hard-partying transvestites and decked-out club kids, and create shoes that would appeal to them—not the jocks and cheerleaders who are more commonly assumed to purchase sneakers. This choice, as trend analyst Irma Zandl remarked in the article, was unusual for a big-name brand. “Most companies are interested in maximizing sales and gaining bigger and bigger market share,” she said. “Converse seems to have decided that what they want to do is have the biggest market share possible of the alternative world.”
For the title of coolest alterna-shoe, Converse’s competition was a UK-based boot company with a sprawling, varied history within the underground. Fifty years ago in the Bavarian Alps, Dr. Klaus Maertens, a German soldier on leave from the battlefield, injured his foot while skiing. At home convalescing in Seeshaupt, the twenty-five-year-old envisioned a shoe like the sturdy ones he wore in combat, but with a supportive sole made from springy rubber rather than the flat leather slab typically used at the time. He fashioned a prototype from found objects: “The week the war ended, everyone started looting. But while most people were looking for valuable stuff like jewels and furs, I picked out a cobbler’s last, some leather, needles and threads, and made myself a pair of shoes with the thick air-cushioned soles I’d been thinking about.” With makeshift boots in hand, Maertens headed to Munich, where he ran into an old friend, Dr. Herbert Funck, who took an immediate interest in the shoes and suggested that the two of them go into business. Again culling recycled materials, they built their original shoe—one that barely resembled the iconic 1460 to come, but that made use of an innovative method of cobbling that would define the brand going forward. Dr. Maertens had dreamed of a well-cushioned shoe, and rather than stitch the sole directly to the upper, he and Funck figured out a way to heat-seal them together, creating elastic air pockets in the process. Voilà—the shoes were indeed comfortable, and after finding immediate success with German hausfraus who spent their days on their feet, Maertens and Funck licensed the new technology to the Griggs family, an established name in English shoemaking. Bill Griggs revised the shoe’s silhouette and dubbed the soles AirWair, advertising the brand via a quirky looped tag that read, “With Bouncing Soles” in a cheerful yellow and white font that was modeled after Griggs’s own handwriting. The time had come to name the shoe. They considered both “Dr. Funck” and “Dr. Maertens,” but the latter won out because of the resemblance of Funck’s name to a certain unsavory expletive. Maertens was anglicized to Martens, and on April 1, 1960, the eight-hole Doc was born.
The 1460 was named for its birthday. As British exports like the Beatles and Mary Quant transformed international fashion, Dr. Martens—comfortable, durable, and costing just two pounds a pair, eminently affordable—quietly found a place in the UK as functional shoes for blue-collar workers, police, and postmen. This working-class legacy gave them their original underground appeal; skinheads, proud of their proletariat roots and looking to distinguish themselves from the financially flush and flashy mods on Carnaby Street, adopted them as their go-to footwear. They wore them with Levi’s red label jeans, meticulously rolled up to three-quarter length in order to highlight the boots, which they kept immaculate (Martin Roach, Dr. Martens historian and author of Dr. Martens: The Story of an Icon, points out that “as they needed no time to style their hair, skins spent literally hours on their clothes and footwear, polishing their DM’s almost obsessively”). Interestingly, although a branch of skinheads later developed into the right-wing, white supremacists most often associated with neo-Nazism, the preeminent bald-headed mischief makers were actually more racially inclusive and tolerant than other contemporaneous groups. Skinheads listened to reggae, ska, and soul—all styles of music derived from African and island culture—and partied peacefully in ethnically diverse dance halls. However, the sinister changes within skinhead culture, combined with the detail that Dr. Martens were invented by a former World War II soldier from Germany, led to the erroneous conclusion that the 1460 started out as a Nazi boot that then filtered into the mainstream, rather than vice versa. It was also within the skinhead movement that one of the most notorious Doc Martens practices was born.
Skins used their shoelaces to communicate, swapping out different colors as a concise sartorial code. This system—which continued well into the 1990s when Doc Martens were worn not just by skinheads but also by a series of ideologically disparate alternative groups looking to self-identify—was never made consistent, so the relationship between a certain color and its implicit meaning could change from place to place. So, for instance, a white lace might signify white supremacy (in the UK, allegiance to the National Front), or it could specifically suggest the opposite, particularly if the white laces were intertwined with black ones. In Canada, yellow laces were understood to identify a police killer, while in other regions, blue laces carried the same connotation. Red laces might herald not only the presence of a neo-Nazi but also could suggest Communist or ultra-left-wing leanings. In the late 1980s, a girl wearing purple laces might be perceived—in some cities—as a lesbian. Even with so many geographical variants, the use of laces to relate information is a fascinating crystallization of a task that shoes perform as a whole. If footwear is a language, then Doc Martens’s laces-as-signifiers is a highly specific dialect, in the same way that regional accents work to identify a speaker’s city or country of origin.
In the late 1960s, the steel-toed versions of Doc Martens were classified as “offensive weapons” and fans were prohibited from wearing them to British football games. The sense that the boots were forbidden made them only more attractive to skinheads, who, even if they weren’t planning to hurt anyone, wanted at least to look like they could. Then, in the 1970s when punk arrived on the scene, the connection between Doc Martens and skinheads gave the shoes a whiff of underground illicitness, and punks started wearing them as well. Roach goes on to explain: “One of the most unique things about Dr. Martens is [that when a] subculture [emerges], part of its raison d’être is to destroy the subculture that came previously, and revel in being the opposite of what was fashionable six months ago. And yet each time a subculture springs up . . . it throws everything out of the wardrobe but keeps the boots.” Part of the reason why, is that no matter the brand, the appearance of combat boots, for their suggestions of war and authority, remains subversive and not so subtly intimidating. When, for instance, A Clockwork Orange premiered in theaters in 1971 and audiences saw the way Alex DeLarge (played by Malcolm McDowell) dressed, they began buying Doc Martens in imitation, despite the fact that he didn’t actually wear them in the film. DMs were an accessible, affordable approximation of the heavy black boots used in the movie, and thus they became central to the 1970s street-style interpretation of DeLarge’s frightening gang-leader look.
Unlike a person who flits from subculture to subculture and thus loses credibility, Doc Martens manage to rise phoenixlike within each one, taken more, not less, seriously for their historical lineage. In the late 1970s a band emerged from the low-income city of Coventry, England, where adolescents came of age under the cloud of the region’s high unemployment rate. The Specials blended reggae, punk, and ska—a genre that derived from Jamaican dance music—and filled the void left by the dwindling punk scene. They started a record label called Two Tone, and the hybrid sound of the Specials went on to influence the subsequent bands they signed. The label didn’t survive long, but its name came to stand for a particular style of music and inspired a retro mode of dress that managed to combine 1950s-era looks with the ubiquitous pairs of Doc Martens.
Soon the shoe company with a traditionally masculine clientele started to appreciate the power of the female consumer, harking back to the days when they were de rigueur for German housewives. According to Roach it was “right around 1985, 1986, [when] someone at Dr. Martens noticed that there was a surge in very small men’s sizes being sold, so they phoned around shops, and they tried to find out what was going on, because they were [curious] why suddenly England was full of men with size 4 feet.” Of course, English men hadn’t gone minuscule en masse, and the people at R. Griggs realized that because the company didn’t manufacture women’s sizes, female customers were buying Doc Martens boots in the smallest men’s sizes they could find. R. Griggs responded not only by producing smaller shoes but also by creating styles exclusively for women—most famously, the floral 1460 that juxtaposed a traditionally feminine pattern and color palette against the aggressively masculine boot.
In 1984, Doc Martens—aka Dr. Martens, aka Docs—became widely available in the United States, and they were promptly adopted by various subcultures in the same way that they had been overseas. Male and female buyers wore them; the ankle-high boot with the signature yellow stitching was quickly associated with the burgeoning grunge scene in Washington State, where heavy-bottomed army boots were ideal for dragging through the muddy streets and lawns native to the damp Pacific Northwest climate. Dr. Martens and its parent company R. Griggs were so confident in the fidelity of their alternative consumer base that they didn’t even have a marketing department until the early 1990s, when the sales numbers shot so high that they could no longer do without one. As Roach says, “As quintessentially English and appealing as it is to think that we could sell twelve million boots from a former cottage in Northampton and not have a marketing department, it just isn’t practical. But even to this day, they are extremely low-key in their marketing approach; they never ever like to force the boot on people. They put the boot out there, and they do marketing and advertising campaigns, but what they know very well is that they have a fifty-year history that the biggest brand checkbooks in the world cannot buy.”
In the 1990s, when people slipped Doc Martens boots onto their feet, they were subscribing to this diverse and sometimes checkered lineage, and communicating to the world that in one way or another, they wanted to be a part of it. This is why, in 1993, a Texas high school banned students from wearing them, for fear that they signaled the presence of skinheads on school grounds. After a series of racially charged crimes upset the Dallas–Fort Worth suburb of Grapevine, school officials started pulling students out of class for wearing Doc Martens and threatening to suspend them if they didn’t change their shoes. These students, who bought the boots not for any political reasons but because they saw their pop-culture heroes wearing them on MTV and in magazines, protested. Ultimately, the school district caved, confessing that they had conflated fashion with fascism. “We goofed,” a spokesperson for the school told the New York Times soon after the incident received national attention. “We wanted to get rid of skinheads, but the way we went about it didn’t work.” What the school officials had failed to take into account was that although skinheads wore Doc Martens, so did rock-and-roll legends like Pete Townshend and Joe Strummer, and that legacy is powerful to a young person looking to define him- or herself. “If you’re twelve [for instance], and you have that relationship with your parents that’s a bit fractious because you’re a teenager . . . [and] you put on a pair of boots that Pete Townshend was wearing in 1967, or punks were wearing in 1976, or Two Tone were wearing in 1979, people take you more seriously. It shows that you’ve got an interest in the alternative,” Roach opined.
Grunge became a short-lived yet highly successful and definitive fad. For grunge acts, and in a way for Seattle as a city, the sense that they were being lauded as the kind of mainstream tastemakers whom they grew up wanting to both vilify and emulate proved destabilizing, and the bottom fell out. The beginning of the end came in 1992 when Marc Jacobs, then a young designer for Perry Ellis, debuted a runway collection inspired by grunge. In an impressive move that underscored both the fashion world’s incredible cultural insight and its tone deafness when it comes to the average citizen, Jacobs showed thrift-store chic at couture prices, commandeering the very style that nonprivileged youth had adopted to distinguish themselves. Though it had been created as a reaction to the 1980s and its excesses, grunge’s demise came via the mechanics of commercialization that its originators had intended to flout. Within just a few years of Nirvana’s rise up the ranks of the Seattle music scene, upper-middle-class suburban teens started wearing Doc Martens and Chuck Taylors as an homage to their favorite bands. The result: a sense of manufactured authenticity gripped the nation as celebrities and consumers alike competed to be the most “real,” the most intuitive, the most entitled to feelings of alienation and pain. A network show like My So-Called Life—in which a fifteen-year-old girl makes a conscious choice to explore the fringes of her high school social scene, and in her inimitable teenage wisdom vacillates between moments of self-obsessed myopia and pitch-perfect perceptiveness—captivated a generation. In the early to mid-1990s, Doc Martens boots turned mainstream, signaling the era of the poseur: a multiyear freaky Friday during which the rich wanted to look poor, the cool wanted to look lame, and the “losers”—who thought the spotlight would never turn their way—basked in the heat of its brightness, before withering and disappearing again.