Ugly genius sneakers
Plus new sunglasses, an under-the-radar comfort sneaker line, a forgotten mid-century design legend whose lamps were bangers & more
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— Erin & Jonah
Erin back with you once again. In today’s Concorde we’ve got:
A need-to-follow chronicler of Y2K’s wildest sport-femme sneakers and other gear…
… which led me to a trove of great ~$30 sneakers no one is checking for.
New sunglasses with non-corny New Wave vibes.
A vibey lamp designed by a midcentury goat whose name has largely been lost to time.
Q from a Spyfriend: What’s a good baby gift for your new-mom BFF?
Let’s get to it —
While Jonah might argue that the ‘90s were the apex of sneaker design for dudes, I’d venture that the 2000s turned out the best, most avant-garde and thrillingly freaky-deaky sneakers for ladies.
In the ‘90s, women basically had to choose between sneakers and dress shoes: sport-femme hybrids like Nike’s 1996 Air Rift, a tabi-toed Mary Jane on a sneaker bottom that still looks fantastic today, were few and far between.
But in the 2000s, “athleisure” hit the scene, and walking around in your workout clothes, whether or not you actually worked out, became a fashion choice, even a flex. On cue, a ton of highly stylized and feminized sportswear flooded the zone. To put it in Spice Girl terms: you could be Sporty and Baby at the same time.
This created, to be clear, a lot of wack looks. But while the Y2K emergence of “sneakers-for-girls” intrigues me mostly in an anthropological way, I am aesthetically invested in how brands remixed women’s footwear, taking cues from golf and approach shoes, wrestling boots, cycling cleats and soccer slides. Many of the bizarre mash-ups that resulted look so hot today that big brands have been going back to the well, re-releasing a string of designs from the early 2000s, like Puma’s Speedcat, which I called out in the summer of 2023, ahead of the reissues that started to drop in the summer of 2024.
So I was stoked when I found an excellent IG account that catalogs and sells astoundingly deep-cut Y2K activewear and sneakers, and which captures the techno-optimist goofiness of the era. The account has put me onto a bunch of sublime slappers that I totally slept on back in the day. Here are some of the best: