Nieman Marcus Will Sell You a "Destroyed" -- Artificially Distressed to the Point of Being Nonfunctional -- Sneaker, And They'll Do It for the Low, Low Price of One Thousand Four Hundred and Twenty Five Dollars

US dollars, not some debased kind of dollar like Esperanto Bucks.

We're not done with this trend yet: Neiman Marcus is currently selling battered and ripped sneakers for $1,425. At first glance, these look ripe for as much mockery as those $425 mud-stained jeans. But if you believe in fashion as art, you can also follow the argument that there's something a little more legitimate about the Maison Margiela Future Destroyed High-Top Sneaker.

The white sneakers appear to have been slashed with a knife, so that bright yellow inner stuffing shows through. They’re covered with staples, as if someone survived a tiger attacked at the office and then used whatever was nearby to keep their shoes on their feet. These are not shoes pre-dirtied to approximate blue-collar style, however. These are gleaming throwbacks to Martin Margiela's deconstructionist work of the 1980s, inspired in part by the work of Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garcons.

The shoe is being marketed towards the semi-retarded sons of rich dentists with very successful group practices, as well as self-identifying cock-holdsters. (Not a slur; Jim Parsons and the rest of the Progressive Human Shield brigade has declared it so.)

Here's the page you can order this sneaker from, with additional angles of this product.

In case you didn't believe me.

Usually, to find a shitty off-brand stupid-looking sneaker that's all cut up and stapled, you'd need to spend $12 on the sort of no-name sneaker they usually only give to refugee children, plus a knife and a stapler.

By the way, the sneakers -- in their non-destroyed form -- debuted in Kanye West's "Yeezus" tour, so we can thank him for this stupid shit.

Oh, and these aren't the first:

"It's a far more edgy answer to Golden Goose’s ‘Distressed Superstar Sneakers' that featured scuff marks, ripped laces and duct-tape reinforcements," Footwear News wrote of the Future Destroyed kicks.

Those Golden Goose shoes, which first came out in 2015, were meant to be a reaction to the "brand new, fresh-out-of-the-box sparkling white sneakers" that dominated the market, Net-a-Porter Vice President of Global Buying Sarah Rutson told Yahoo Style at the time. But they received quite a backlash for looking a lot like the shoes of someone who couldn’t afford to buy any new shoes, let alone a $400 pair.

Four hundred a pair? Pshah. Only grubby poor people would buy those.

Here's what that deeply stupid footwear looks like.

posted by Ace at 08:41 PM

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