| Over the past few months, you might have seen some bulbous red boots by Brooklyn-based MSCHF boinging across your screen. Cartoonishly puffed up, like an upside down mushroom made into footwear, they look as if they could have jumped out of the screen of a Game Boy and into the real world. They have been huge in the fashion – and this week, thanks to Paris Hilton, Victoria Beckham and Crocs, a big yellow perforated version has now lit up the internet. Your first reaction might be to wonder who would wear such a monstrosity (Janelle Monáe and Lil Nas X, for starters). But they also reach beyond the rarefied world of celebrity. Despite costing a pretty penny at $350, the Big Red Boots were selling for four times their retail price when they launched in February, according to the resale site StockX. And you can expect the MSCHF x Crocs boot, revealed by Tommy Cash at Rick Owens’s spring/summer men’s show at Paris fashion week in June, to prove covetable when they come out later this summer – despite their $450 price tag. So what is going on? Fashion loves an uncanny shoe, one that subverts traditional ideas of what is beautiful and therefore, you might previously have assumed, desirable. There was Alexander McQueen’s grotesque Armadillo silhouette that looked as if it belonged in Star Wars. There is the tabi boot, a cloven shoe first designed by Martin Margiela in 1988 and recently discovered by a new generation. Or the Loewe pump peppered so densely with deflated balloons that from a distance they register as ruffles. And high-fashion isn’t the only sphere with a soft spot for ugly footwear – as you will have surmised from the ubiquity of Crocs all around you, big, ugly shoes show no signs of going anywhere. These boots are the – logical (!) – next step. “There is a sense that as clothes have become largely recognisable, easy and utilitarian – shoes need to carry some of the punch,” says editor and academic Dal Chodha. “These boots laugh in the face of sensible shoes, they point the finger at every single one of us who double-taps, tries on, lusts after a pair.” | 