There is a big, fuck-off boot and the internet can’t stop looking at it. MSCHF, the Brooklyn brand known for making footwear that sends folks into a frenzy – Lil Nas X wears them, Nike and Vans have sought litigation against them – have launched what they’ve appropriately called the big red boot. It is, as the name suggests, a big red boot. It’s a big red boot similar to the ones worn by Boots, Dora the Explorer’s sidekick, and Astro Boy, the manga hero. But they have never been made for real life wear – unless you count the sinister work of cosplayers. Now, for $350, you can wear the boots.
We have spent a long time loving big shoes, haven’t we? We love a big shoe that seems tailor-made to make your fashion agnostic father look at it and say, ‘What in the great fuck is that?’ or ‘Is that a joke?’. If anything, you want your big shoe to elicit a reaction like this. You want people to be affronted by what you wear on your feet. Case in point: Balenciaga’s boundary shifting work over the past five years. The Triple-S. The Raf Simons Ozweegos. But now it’s time for the boot to have her moment. Like, the Balenciaga trooper boot, a sort of part-military, part-Minecraft work of glorious impracticality. It struck the perfect balance between genius and absurd. We all want them. The big shoe is dead. Now it’s time for the big boot.
Speaking to Highsnobiety, MSCHF co-founder Daniel Greenberg called the big red boot “a realisation of a specific sort of cartoonish abstraction of a shoe”, adding that it’s “an absurd, simplified form that conveys the idea of ‘BOOT’ without worrying too much about the particulars of realism”. Oftentimes, I too open my wardrobe, peer at my shoe rack and think about which of my footwear really, truly conveys the idea of boot.
He’s right: the big red boot is absolutely a boot. ‘That’s quite the boot’, your dad may say, when you come back home for Christmas wearing them, as if you’ve dragged them off the corpse of Santa Claus. You’ve never seen a boot like it.
Daniel Greenberg told Highsnob: “You never design shoes to be shaped like feet. Big Red Boots are REALLY not shaped like feet, but they are EXTREMELY shaped like boots.”
Boots.