Sorry Mom, I Spent $350 on Some Dumb Sneakers

So I bought this pair of ridiculously expensive sneakers my senior year of high school.

Called Common Projects, they’re these Italian-made, blindingly white low-tops; just smooth leather that still reeks of that musky leather smell, the only distinguishing feature a small set of gold numbers printed near the heel—“1528 46 0506” on mine. They’re so plain that it’s hard to imagine paying over $400 for them. I didn’t, of course: There was a sale, and I’d just gotten my first high school job, so I saved up and paid about $350 for a pair of nondescript, well-made sneakers that, honestly, look like flattened-out Stan Smiths. Why?

I was just getting out of that “sweatpants and math club t-shirt” phase that dominated the first 18 years of my life, and was spending all my hard-earned cash on clothing and shoes. When I bought the shoes, I told myself: I will wear these so often. People will respect me and give me favorable treatment when they spot the gold numbers and realize I am a man of Means and Taste. And so on.

Part of my prophecy came true: I did wear them a lot, but I could’ve done the same with a pair of $65 Reeboks. I want to wear something nice, luxurious even, I’d said to myself. But also: $400. The question, as I reflect back on my choice to spend such a massive sum on footwear, comes down to this: How do you make sense of these ridiculous Nice Things? How do you understand your own urge to buy and wear them?

First step: Try and justify it. Find articles like “Common Projects Are the Sneakers That Made Me Into a Grown-Ass Man” and “THE MOST VERSATILE SNEAKER A MAN CAN OWN” that extol the shoes’ “artisanal feel… reminiscent of a bygone era.” These articles ooze belatedness: They mourn a (probably fictitious) time when well-heeled, svelte young men wore clean colors and fresh linen, when their shoes still smelled of Sicilian cows, when things were made by hand and built to last. Reading articles like these helps you feel good about yourself and your recent purchase. Your $350 is more subversive, more anti-bourgeois than you might think. If you really want to, you can believe that the shoes subvert the inherently wicked ways of capitalism, whispering promises of freedom from the tyranny of the class hierarchy. Aleks Eror in an article for Highsnobiety writes, “The fetishization of commodities is one of the things that nauseates me most about the modern condition, but Common Projects manages to do capitalism in a measured way that fits with my center-left political leanings.”

But the thing is, no one noticed my shoes. Or cared that I was wearing them. Maybe one person has recognized the sneakers in my year of owning them, and no one—except my mom—has given their price much attention. We return, in some sense, to the same concern that’s been bouncing around my head all this semester as I’ve been writing this column: namely, what I’m wearing and why I’m wearing it.

At many of the events I’ve covered this semester, I’ve seen how the costumes we wear, consciously or otherwise, can reflect an unbridgeable gap between how we want to be seen and how we want to look. Do I put these shoes on in order to be seen in them, or do I wear them for myself? Are they a way to show others I am a certain kind of person, or are the shoes an extension of some greater “identity”, separate of others’ perceptions? The answer, I think, is somewhere in the middle.

Everyone I interviewed for this column—from cosplayers to hypebeasts, from drunk semi-Irish Bostonians to drunk onesie-wearing Bostonians—seemed not to see why self-expression and self-presentation have to be mutually exclusive. For them, it’s aspirational: For a moment, in the right outfit, they can become the person that they want to be. Just because others are watching doesn’t make it less true.

Okay, so back to how I justify buying Nice Thing(s). Second step: Realize that maybe there is a space in which I can wear my Nice Thing(s) and feel good about myself because I like the way they look. I do like the way the shoes look, especially now. They’ve been my go-to, I-don’t-know-what-to-wear shoes for the past year—I wore them to every event I covered for this column this semester—so they’ve acquired a kind of charming weathered-white look to them. The leather has softened and fits snugly against my feet. They squeak quietly as I walk. Delicate wrinkles dapple the toebox. I always end up wearing them in my dreams. White shoes go with everything. And so on. I don’t have to convince you of anything; I guess I’m trying to say that I like the shoes so much because, more than anything, most people won’t—or don’t—care about these shoes. If you were an attention-chasing fool and bought these for the express purpose of impressing others, I suspect you’d be sorely disappointed. No one ever really notices them, and so the potentially obnoxious exhibitionist side of style becomes less of a concern, and I get to wear these shoes for the sake of my having admired and liked and worn the shit out of them.

The cynical take on Common Projects—which might say this is just a whole new level of privilege, in which we buy expensive things that don’t look expensive so we can feel good walking around incognito in expensive things—is perfectly valid. This perspective is right, but it’s missing the point. Maybe I just wanted—want—something nice, something I like on my feet, something to wear until the soles melt, leaving me be-socked on the hard pavement, $350 down. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

Magazine writer Alan R. Dai can be reached at alan.dai@thecrimson.com. This is the final installment of his fashion column, Live Fresh or Dai, in which he traveled around the city to various events that were, however obliquely, fashion-related. Follow him on Twitter @dai_alan_dai.