Schidt

I recently was in our local skate shop and one of the staff was mentioning a conversation he had earlier over the phone with a Principal of one of Dunedin’s local high school. He was complaining about the shoes they were selling and how they weren’t suitable for wearing at his school as the weren’t “formal black lace up shoes”.

Now I looked at the shoe above and thought that maybe it might fit the criteria. Now I wouldn’t wear this around myself because they look too much like a school shoe, but it looks like it might be comfortable and I think if I were still at school I might choose this. Apparently it’s made out of leather and you can see it’s a lace up type. Globe have gone out of their way to cater for this market and designed a shoe accordingly. I was thus a bit confused as to what the Principal might be on about.

So I thought about if you had a strict criteria what would a “formal black leather lace up shoe” look like? Google images is your friend, so I looked for some black shoes and in some posh overseas stores I found these beauties. Yes, these are probably what he was talking about.


Now they are probably leather and I can see they might be a little different in small details than the Globe ones above. They are more pointy and the lace holes are quite small, but I don’t think there is a significant difference. So I was a bit puzzled, but I thought may it was in the detail that I was not akin too. Sure I wear my black skate shoes to Weddings and Funerals and they certainly don’t look as mainstream as the Globe ones, but that’s me and maybe it’s a generational thing and I don’t have a clue.

But then I was walking around and I saw kids wearing these things.


Surely they can’t be “formal black leather lace up shoes”. They look like industrial safety shoes. Surely school isn’t that hard core that students need to wear black safety shoes. Maybe they need protection so that falling heavy text books don’t damage their toes, and they need that thickness of rubber underneath because of all the miles they do traveling between classes. I’d hate to wear those things, imagine how sore your feet would get lugging these lumps of rubber around.

Now I was really confused. So I typed “formal black leather lace up shoe” into Google Images because, well things had obviously changed and my idea what people wear on formal occasions is different to what Principal’s think. I didn’t get too many hits because it was a full phrase rather than key words but these were the ones that turned up.


Now I’m really confused. There is obviously quite a wide criteria in this whole “formal black leather lace up shoe” thing, but I still can’t see why the Globe shoe at the top doesn’t fit into it. So I thought things have changed and I wondered when that happened, so I looked at some old school photos. Now I thought these kids might be wearing skate shoes.

But then I saw these ones.

I realized they were the dreaded Nomad shoes and Treks. These were senior students so obviously things are a little more flexible in what they could wear, but the juniors could wear those hideous shoes without any problems. So I thought I’d search google images for a decent picture of these ugly Nomad shoes to show people who’d never seen them. I went through all the images and all I could find was this one photo to show them off.

The teacher in the picture is wearing Nomads and looking through some other pictures teachers seemed to be wearing them too, mostly the beige ones. On reading a bit more of the web it seemed that some teachers were a little slow to adapt to changing fashion and eventually teachers wearing the beige Nomads became a source of amusement, and beige Nomads disappeared from popular culture. The fashion gods sighed a sigh of relief.

I digress.

Here’s another interesting fact, The New Zealand Medical Journal in their article titled Interest and participation in selected sports among New Zealand adolescents reports that 20% males aged 12–17 years in their sample participated in skateboarding. Skateboarding was the 6th most popular activity for those males. For females it was less at 5%.

Globe are not constructing shoes that are as hideous as Nomad shoes or those safety shoes or even as bad as the Google Images defined “formal black lace up shoes” and the variation that that encompasses. I think the Globe and most of the shoes on the desk above would fit into the “formal black leather lace up” category and would definitely fit into the “black leather lace up” category. I can only conclude that because of a skater bias, some Principals and Boards may find it difficult to welcome such shoes with skateboarding brand names into their schools. Some of the people who make and enforce these footwear rules may have some sort of cultural baggage associated with skateboarding and skateboarders; maybe they were made fun of at their local skateboard park. They would like to think that the 20% males aged 12–17 years in their school that had some sort of skateboarding affiliation simply did not exist. There are no evil skateboarders at their school. Apart from that skateboard shoes are comfortable and I can see why students, even if they didn’t skate, might choose to wear them.

Tags: school shoes, shoes