Two things arrived in fashion this week that should not be interesting but are. Adidas' Purechill recovery clog, a post-workout shoe so well designed you want to wear it everywhere, and Birkenstock's new studded sandals, a little punk, a little flashy, extremely deliberate. Both are objects that began as functional and became cultural. Both are happening at the same time that Highsnobiety ran a rare look inside Donald Judd's New York home, focusing on the objects he chose to keep there. The throughline is: what do you keep when you could have anything?
Judd's Objects and the Anti-Decoration Impulse
Judd's Spring Street loft was famously not a showroom. It was a working environment where furniture, art, and everyday objects existed at the same level of intentionality. The recovery clog operates on a similar logic: it refuses ornament, earns its presence through function, and then becomes beautiful as a result. The New Yorker's critics noted this week that the Met Gala and The Devil Wears Prada 2 both highlight dramatic shifts in who calls the shots in fashion and media. The answer, increasingly, is nobody central. Taste has decentralized into micro-signals, and the recovery clog is one of them.
Utility, Punk, and the Post-Logo Moment
The studded Birkenstock is more complicated. It takes a shoe associated with anti-fashion, adds hardware associated with punk, and produces something that is neither but borrows the credibility of both. This is the same move MM6 Maison Margiela makes repeatedly: take a quotidian form, defamiliarize it, charge accordingly. Andrea Branzi, the subject of two major Milan shows this week, spent his career arguing that design should model its ambiguity on natural systems rather than resolve into clean function. The recovery clog and the studded sandal are both, in their way, Branzian objects: comfortable with contradiction, indifferent to category.