How Did Flip-Flops Get to be Everywhere?

It has long been a commonplace to remark the "casualization" of clothing styles in recent decades, with footwear a common subject of such discussion--particularly the way sandals, and especially flip-flops, have become extremely ubiquitous, with a great many people wearing them in situations where they did not wear them before, often in situations where not merely good taste but simple safety suggests a different shoe (as when people wear flip-flops on the treadmill).

Those looking to explain the matter commonly claim the fashion industry bowed to consumer demand for low-cost, "comfortable," "convenient," clothing, and to suggest that it also reflected society's becoming more casual--less hierarchical, less "uptight," freer.

Anyone who is not a complete idiot should find such explanations highly suspect. After all, in the marketplace the idea that the "consumer is king" is mere neoliberal claptrap. Business offers the consumer what it wants to offer them, take it, or take it, and they certainly have never shown interest in offering consumers low-cost anything. (Consider the terms on which people buy houses, cars, food, medicine and everything else.) At the same time society did not become less hierarchical, less uptight, more free. Rather this has been an era of surging inequality in which the haves lord it over the have-nots as never before, as not just the rich but the more impressionable poor embrace anew many of history's most retrograde ideas and attitudes history, from Social Darwinism to monarchism, while those without wealth and power feel increasingly devalued by society and insecure in their position in it amid a climate of sanctimonious, severe, vindictive, punitive judgment of everything people do. That there are Chief Executive Officers who prefer casual clothes to three-piece suits somehow means a more equal society is just the style-over-substance-exploiting bait-and-switch of market populism--a particular flavor of neoliberal claptrap. And pretending otherwise looks foolish. After all, as women's shoes demonstrate, high-cost, "fancy" dress shoes for formal occasions did not get replaced by more casual shoes, but rather open-shoe styles came to predominate in the selection of high-cost, fancy, dress shoes on the market, a very different thing, all as dress shoes are worn at least as much as ever. (The woman who from the ankles up is dressed casually, or for the office, but wears ostentatiously dressy sandals they are clearly not wearing for reasons of inexpensiveness, comfort or convenience is not an uncommon sight--and consistent with a broad societal pattern of using footwear as a proxy for a broader fashionability somehow impractical in given circumstances.) Meanwhile many of those "cheap" and "casual" sandals sell at anything but cheap casual wear prices on the basis of brand names and the gimmickry of what is often euphemistically called "luxury minimalism."

It makes much more sense to argue that what is going on is business giving the consumer less at more or higher prices in the way that we see everywhere else (all other things being equal an open shoe, entailing less material and less assembly, would be expected to make for a higher profit margin), with this dovetailing with social signals reflecting the extreme opposite of a more egalitarian society. Consider, after all, what expensive sandals say about those wearing them--that compared with others they can afford to spend a lot of money on such a "minimalist" and even flimsy shoe; that they can take the time and trouble and expense of making the feet they keep showing off to the world in those open shoes "presentable" (more money not just for footwear producers, but everyone making a buck from pedicures and other "maintenance," too); and of course, that unlike the rabble they don't have to do hard labor, don't need to do very much walking, don't go anywhere dirty or dangerous, don't do anything that might require more substantive foot protection in the plush life they lead; in an "in your face" display of the "conspicuous waste" that Thorstein Veblen analyzed so brilliantly over a century ago, which people far from being so privileged mindlessly imitate.

To be frank, all this seems fairly obvious. So why don't we hear more about it? The answer, I think, is not just a matter of neoliberal claptrap being society's conventional wisdom, but also how any sort of intellectual alternative may be especially rare in those corners of the press that address fashion. Even more than is the case with, for example, the entertainment press, the fashion press seem to act as press agents for the business they cover, deferring to their interests and their thinking that much more completely, with it not helping that if artists may on the whole be more inclined to flatter and glorify and pander to the rich and powerful than challenge them, any sort of egalitarian or socially critical thought or feeling may be especially unlikely among those particular courtiers of the super-rich, the couturiers of the rich, who look at the homeless and only see inspiration for "derelicte" (Ben Stiller getting at least that much right). At the same time particularly few outside this world are likely to bother with these issues. To cite an obvious example, leftist publications often do review movies and TV shows and popular music, providing some alternative to the views that prevail among the mainstream critics (for those who are ready to find their way to it, admittedly the web we have doesn't make it easy). They don't write much about fashion, though, leaving the conventional stupidities about it that much less contested.