The Making of a Pattern

That is an version of The Surprise Reader, a e-newsletter during which our editors advocate a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Join right here to get it each Saturday morning.

When my colleague Amanda Mull’s mother wouldn’t let her purchase excessive heels in highschool, she obtained an after-school job and purchased them herself. Amanda continued her dedication to foot-ruining footwear for years: “After I was 25, a bodily therapist who was treating my ankle, destroyed years prior throughout rec-league soccer, informed me that he’d by no means earlier than had a consumer with a leg damage present up in flip-flops.”

Now, at age 37, Amanda is popping towards consolation finally, as are many different sore-footed shoe shoppers her age. Over the previous decade, she defined in a current article, “ultra-comfy sneakers, comfortable clogs, sandals with arch assist, and all method of quasi-orthopedic footwear haven’t simply grow to be extra plentiful than ever; they’ve additionally grow to be cool.”

Amanda explains that aesthetics alone aren’t sufficient to make a development final—“as an alternative, they’re the spark that will get a hearth going; the scale of the eventual blaze relies upon largely on the setting during which it burns, and what sorts of wants and wishes can be found to gasoline it.” Right this moment, we’re exploring the numerous elements—a few of which you may by no means have thought to affiliate with garments, footwear, or baggage—that assist these “development blazes” unfold.

On Tendencies

Cool Folks Unintentionally Saved America’s Toes

By Amanda Mull

Millennials popularized cumbersome, super-cushioned footwear. Then Millennials obtained outdated.

One thing Odd Is Occurring With Purses

By Amanda Mull

The place do customers flip when an business constructed on novelty runs out of latest concepts?

Every thing You Put on Is Athleisure

By Derek Thompson

Yoga pants, tennis footwear, and the 100-year historical past of how sports activities modified the best way Individuals gown (From 2018)

Nonetheless Curious?

Different Diversions

P.S.

I’ll depart you with a quote from Lawrence Schlossman, a co-host of the boys’s style podcast Throwing Matches, that’s concurrently somewhat unhappy and somewhat hopeful. Describing the Millennial flip towards comfy footwear, he stated to Amanda, “You’re simply getting older, and also you need to look cool, however you even have a physique that’s completely failing you since you’re growing older, and that’s simply the way it works … Time stops for no man, and it stops for no sneakerhead.”

He’s proper; time comes for us all. At the least we’ll be comfy after we meet it head-on.

— Isabel