I love MSCHF’s new Big Red Boots, but I would never buy them. As the minutes count down on the MSCHF Sneakers app, I resist the urge to enter the draw for a $350 pair of boots that are going to be worn once and then sit in my room unused. (I guess I could try reselling it immediately? Like all MSCHF drops the shoes are selling on the secondary market at a significant markup – currently StockX lists a lowest ask of $1612).
Is it worth the price? That’s a bad question. It has no utility, and so it is not “worth” anything in the way a well-tailored shirt or a sleek engraved ring would be. Instead, the value here comes from creativity, collectibility, and clout. The Big Red Boot skyrocketed to popularity in the streets of a busy New York Fashion Week, with Diplo, Iggy Azalea, and Lil Wayne making appearances wearing them. It is a ridiculous product – built on interesting ideas and backed up by a genius marketing campaign. It is something that is characteristic of MSCHF, who have used similar tactics to sell blurred blocks of money, popsicles shaped like billionaires (eat the rich), and paper shopping bags from luxury brands (without any products in them).
Behind the hype is a pair of massive rubber shoes that look very similar to the boots worn by the boy-android protagonist of the Japanese anime Astro Boy. MSCHF is cryptic about what the idea here is, except that it is intentionally cartoonish. Their drop description says, “The aesthetic Overton window continues to stretch open towards the unreal”, proceeding to reference Alexander McQueen’s infamous Armadillo Heel. MSCHF’s description ends by saying, “It’s a footwear design truism that the shape of a shoe is not the shape of a foot. Big Red Boots are REALLY not shaped like feet, but they are EXTREMELY shaped like boots.”
There is a lot here, most obviously a critique of a fashion industry where shoes being uncomfortable go largely unquestioned. An industry that seems to say, “Of course beautiful high-fashion footwear is difficult to wear, is that not a price worth paying?” The template for new shoes is not based around feet but around old shoes: heels get taller and arches get curvier, accentuating older designs without much regard for the feet that must fit within them. The Big Red Boot simply takes that idea to its logical conclusion: the most shoe-like shoe is one based on the design we abstract to in cartoons. They are uncomfortable, but complaining about that feels like missing the point.
The cynicism, however, masks design decisions that are fascinating to discuss. The one I am most interested in is the Big Red Boots’ place within an aesthetic movement that I am hoping goes big in fashion over the next few years. By pulling Astroboy into the real world, MSCHF has made art (of a sort) that is the converse of (hyper)realism.
Hyperrealism is an art movement that relies on realistic renderings of fictional entities. Artists in this movement create detailed works that are indistinguishable from digital photos, including renderings of impossible or imagined things. If photographs are simulations of reality, then hyperrealistic art is a simulation of the simulation. MSCHF’s shoes are the converse of this. It makes real something that is clearly a representation, Astroboys shoes, that no one would mistake for reality. It does the opposite of simulating something, it brings something that is not real into reality.
They are not the first to do it. The example that stands out most to me is comic-book cosplay, when cosplayers are dressed in such a way that it feels like you are watching simulated characters. From painting their faces with solid shadows to adding ink-like textures to clothes, they wear compelling and beautiful costumes that are surreal but fun. Instead of responding to the realists’ desire to replicate reality with knee-jerk abstraction, this form of anti-realism responds to it by blurring the lines between the real and the unreal.
MSCHF’s shoes don’t look as good as the cosplay, but it did pull these ideas from underneath the woodwork to the squirming mainstream of the New York Fashion Week. The potential here is dizzying. From impressionist textures on gowns to Seurat’s points on gentlemen’s hats, the tradition of hundreds of years of art history is the perfect complement to the bold freshness that defines this sort of anti-realism. This can also combine apparel, make-up, and accessories in a complementary blend without any of them outshining the rest. Here, the sum is greater than its parts.
Are we going to see an explosion in the bringing-art-to-the-real-world-style fashion? It’s difficult to say. While some are alluding to these ideas, the reaction to the Big Red Boots has largely been focused on other elements of the design, its boldness and its critique of the hype-driven fashion industry. It remains to be seen whether the anti-realistic aspect will be picked up on, or whether any of it will still be relevant next week.
In this brief moment, though, they have allowed us a glimpse into a world of fashion that blurs the lines between the real and the unreal.