‘If you kick someone, they go boing!’: Why is everyone suddenly wearing Big Ugly Boots?

Over the past few months, you might have seen some bulbous red boots by Brooklyn-based MSCHF boinging across your screen. Cartoonishly puffed up, like an upside down mushroom made into footwear, they look as if they could have jumped out of the screen of a Game Boy and into the real world. They have been huge in the fashion – and this week, thanks to Paris Hilton, Victoria Beckham and Crocs, a big yellow perforated version has now lit up the internet.

Your first reaction might be to wonder who would wear such a monstrosity (Janelle Monáe and Lil Nas X, for starters). But they also reach beyond the rarefied world of celebrity. Despite costing a pretty penny at $350, the Big Red Boots were selling for four times their retail price when they launched in February, according to the resale site StockX. And you can expect the MSCHF x Crocs boot, revealed by Tommy Cash at Rick Owens’s spring/summer men’s show at Paris fashion week in June, to prove covetable when they come out later this summer – despite their $450 price tag.

So what is going on? Fashion loves an uncanny shoe, one that subverts traditional ideas of what is beautiful and therefore, you might previously have assumed, desirable. There was Alexander McQueen’s grotesque Armadillo silhouette that looked as if it belonged in Star Wars. There is the tabi boot, a cloven shoe first designed by Martin Margiela in 1988 and recently discovered by a new generation. Or the Loewe pump peppered so densely with deflated balloons that from a distance they register as ruffles. And high-fashion isn’t the only sphere with a soft spot for ugly footwear – as you will have surmised from the ubiquity of Crocs all around you, big, ugly shoes show no signs of going anywhere. These boots are the – logical (!) – next step. “There is a sense that as clothes have become largely recognisable, easy and utilitarian – shoes need to carry some of the punch,” says editor and academic Dal Chodha. “These boots laugh in the face of sensible shoes, they point the finger at every single one of us who double-taps, tries on, lusts after a pair.”

This is also about the internet. In recent times, virality has been a driving force in fashion – what will stand out on a screen often proves big business, meaning designers have worked with a mind to making a visual gag or meme. These boots are pure spectacle – it makes a lot of sense that they have appealed in the world of wrestling, which has been called the “spectacle of excess”. With these shoes, according to Chodha, “the meme has leaked off the screen”.

It is also all about community. Fashion loves a clique more than most, and boots this bonkers will become a kind of in-joke. “The boots are very knowing in the sense that they are worn for attention, they are not subtle, they are utterly of their time,” says Chadha. “They also reinforce the fact that clothes are worn as a statement … It really is a layered in-joke – and we are the butt of it.”

“It is 100% Baudrillard’s hyperreal in action,” says trend analyst Sabrina Faramarzi, referring to the French sociologist who defined “hyperreality” as the inability to distinguish reality from representations of it. As a press release about the Big Red Boots read at the time: “Cartoonishness is an abstraction that frees us from the constraints of reality. If you kick someone in these boots, they go boing!”

The metaverse and reality are blurring and fashion is responding with more than just absurd footwear: Loewe’s spring/summer 2023 collection, for example, featured “pixelated” clothes, 3D garments engineered to look like 8-bit renderings of clothes.

MSCHF is known for this kind of stunt – as its website states, it is “an art collective that engages art, fashion, tech, and capitalism [and subverts] mass/popular culture and corporate operations.” They have designed gimmicks to wear on your feet, and then be photographed in for social media – it says it all that the hashtag “mschfboots” has 63.8M views on TikTok, while “#bigredboots” has 252.1M views. These are boots designed to gain traction in an attention economy.

This is footwear that slots neatly into the psychologically messy idea, which has been gaining traction in the last few years, that we might be unwittingly living in a simulation (according to a recent article in Scientific American, the chances are 50-50). That might be a scary concept, but at least with boots like these we’re well placed to boing our way through it, picking up coins and chatting to mushrooms along our merry way.