Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (15 page)

The classic age of the sneaker
was the baby boom era of the 1950s. Life and dress became more informal after World War II, especially in the United States. Adult men and women wore hats less often, and sneakers gained favor with children over leather shoes. In fact, they were among the first products sold explicitly for youth appeal. School authorities dropped their initial resistance. When the New York State legislature abolished
its public school dress code in 1957, other states followed. While total footwear sales remained flat at 600 million pairs per year, sales of sneakers grew from 35 million in the early 1950s to 150 million by 1962. Just as the
Hat Council of America (now long defunct) unsuccessfully promoted the health benefits of headgear in the same era, the Leather Industries of America warned in magazine advertisements,
press releases, and even cartoons of the dangers rubber-soled sneakers posed to growing feet. Although sneakers had been available with heel and arch supports since the 1930s, one advertisement in
Parents’
magazine cautioned: “Madam, only leather shoes assure your child proper support, correct fit and protection.” So powerful was the campaign that even an overview of sneakers published in 1978
recalled mothers’ warnings of “flat feet, fat feet, swollen ankles, bulbous heels, ingrown toenails …” To the future newspaper columnist Richard Cohen, growing up amid this propaganda, something was not right. Sneaker-wearing children of low-income families were becoming formidable runners. By the 1960s, medical opinion had already begun to turn. Only 11 percent of doctors disapproved of sneakers,
according to a study commissioned by one manufacturer—for Cohen, a warning against medical alarmism.
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B. A. Spinney was one of a number of now-forgotten inventors experimenting with air-cushioned insoles early in the twentieth century. Leaks doomed early models. The idea had to wait for new gases and containment systems
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Just as medical opinion was turning in favor of sneakers, a technological and social transformation was beginning. The boundary between the competitive
athletic shoe and the sneaker, once sharply defined except in basketball and tennis, was starting to break down. And international markets, once strictly segmented by continent, were combining. The makers of leather shoes were losing not only children but adults to the diverse group of rubber companies and athletic suppliers.

What changed the sneaker into the modern running shoe was a series
of new techniques. The first was essential: jogging. It originated in New Zealand in the early 1960s as a public fitness movement that sent dozens of men, women, and children trotting through public parks. Bill Bower-man, a founder of Blue Ribbon Sports (later Nike) and a nationally famous track coach, was amazed at the speed and endurance even of elderly New Zealand runners. In 1963, he introduced
jogging classes in Oregon; YMCAs across the country used his materials to promote their own programs. Running was starting to influence style: in August 1966,
Footwear News
noted that the film
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
was helping sales of “track shoe fabric casuals.” In 1967 Bowerman coauthored the best-selling
Jogging: A Fitness Program for All Ages
. Track or marathon shoes
were not really necessary, the authors said: “Probably the shoes you
wear for gardening, working in the shop or around the house will do just fine.” But Bowerman’s consulting orthopedist concluded, after reviewing medical articles on an epidemic of foot and leg injuries among runners, that shoes were indeed the problem and that special shoes with more elevated heels were needed.
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While Nike
and its competitors made their reputations on the endorsements of many of the world’s greatest athletes, it was really the out-of-shape, casual runners who inadvertently triggered a technological revolution. The nineteenth century’s great pedestrians had contributed almost nothing, though their mix of running and walking was not so different from jogging. The shoe renaissance was a favorable unintended
technological consequence of the worldwide spread of a technique. Seldom in the history of any apparel industry have so many new ideas emerged in only two decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Already in 1966 the U.S. branch of the Bata Shoe Organization (originally a Czech company, reestablished in Canada) introduced the two-color, injection-molded sole on its basketball model the Bullet.
Thus began the decline of vulcanizing (processes derived from Goodyear’s original purification of rubber with heat and sulfur). From Europe came the “training shoe,” so called because it was designed not for any one sport like track or football but for conditioning programs to prepare for competing. From America emerged the heel wedge, developed for runners in 1962 by New Balance, a Boston
orthopedic shoe company that applied other lessons from corrective footwear, widening the toe box and eliminating seams. Americans also were the great tread experimenters. New Balance introduced a ripple sole, and Nike’s first model featured a sole molded on the household waffle iron of Bill Bowerman, bringing a cleatlike surface to the rubber sole itself. (Bowerman intended it for tracks; road runners,
not the inventor, first promoted it as a training shoe.) And Japan was an important early innovator. Sneakers were already beginning to supplant zori among children in 1955, although the influence of traditional footwear remained so strong that one marathon shoe of the same year actually had a tabilike divided toe box. The manufacturer, Tiger, introduced the now ubiquitous nylon uppers in the
1960s. It was also using arch supports and continuous midsole cushioning on different shoes; Nike, still under its original name of Blue Ribbon Sports, combined these innovations in a single shoe, originally made for the new company by Tiger.
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The technology that did the most for athletic footwear starting in the late 1960s had nothing to do with shoemaking. It was television. Athletic
shoe
promotion had a long history, going back at least to A.G. Spalding’s out-fitting of the track and field events of the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, and his assistance to U.S. marathoners in the 1908 games in London. The basketball star Chuck Taylor joined Converse in the 1920s and added his signature to a line of sneakers, still a classic brand with 600 million pairs sold through the twentieth century.
The favorite model of the 1932 Montgomery Ward mail order catalogue was the Dutch Lonborg Basketball Shoe, designed by a championship-winning Northwestern University coach and featuring a “non-heat insole” and sponge-rubber cushion heel. Still, most print accounts of sporting events did not mention the winners’ equipment, and even spectators might need coaching to recognize the Lonborg by its
khaki-colored duck and double toe cap. Television meant that recognizably branded shoes, especially when worn by champions, could have instant national and global recognition. Even before the 1954 World Cup match, Adi Dassler had been producing his shoes with contrasting stripes because young customers were requesting them not by their brand name but as the shoes with this feature. The Adidas trefoil
appeared during the broadcast of the German team’s World Cup breakthrough in 1954. The German baby boom generation was soon clamoring for them. In Britain, too, enthusiasm for Adidas was strong: the shoe consultant Phillip Nutt recalls that his father, who made traditional models, abandoned the soccer market and converted his factory to children’s shoes. The power of the visual endorsement was
born.
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Paradoxically, the greatest American media testimonial was made by athletes who removed their shoes. After finishing first and third in the 200-meter event in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos took off their shoes before climbing the medal stand, bowed their heads, and raised their fists in black gloves as a protest against racism. Appearing
in their stockinged feet to symbolize black poverty, they inadvertently drew attention to their footwear, Suede model Pumas with a distinctive pattern of swirling and crossing strips, made by another branch of the Dassler family that had become Adidas’s fratricidal archrival. Some shoe industry veterans believe the incident was crucial in accelerating the black youth market, which in turn was
shaping national popular culture. (The writer Stephen Talty has remarked that “black New York teenagers … are to sneakers what the Académie Française is to the French language.”) The European market followed a parallel course. Soccer enthusiasts in England began to wear Adidas Sambas and even crossed the Channel to find the latest sport shoe models. The 1972 Olympics was the high point of the Adidas
strategy: more than three
out of four athletes and all officials wore their shoes, including thirty-one of thirty-eight gold medalists in track. Since then, most athletic shoes have been designed with a trademark prominently displayed as an element of stitching. Visual marketing made team adoption and celebrity endorsement more important than ever.
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The controversy surrounding payments to Olympic
athletes and others has only occasionally touched on either the technology of shoes or the style of play. The technical innovations of the 1970s and 1980s were an explosion of creativity, of new styles and processes, sometimes cosmetic or faddish but often meticulously researched. The contemporary footwear industry developed few entirely new materials. A standard handbook published in 1987 notes
that by 1959, all “basic polymers important to footwear manufacture” were already commercially available. Natural and synthetic rubber, modified by a number of agents for optimal durability, elasticity, and appearance, are still the favored materials for outsoles.
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It is the upper of today’s athletic shoes that determines not only much of their look but also the international organization of
their production. Today’s upper is an intricate weave of synthetics and often leathers, setting it off from the usually black or white canvas of the 1950s sneaker. The change amazed veteran workers in the industry. When Nike began U.S. production in a former sneaker plant in Saco, Maine, in 1978, the cutters they hired had been accustomed to producing just three pieces, a vamp (for the forefoot)
and two quarters (for the sides and heel). Now there was a rainbow of nylon, vinyl, transparent mesh, and suede, each with different properties, that had to be cut precisely and stitched together to form a rugged unit. Performance, comfort, looks, cost, and visual marketing— not necessarily in that order—have determined the geometry of the upper. Combinations of parts can interact in unexpected ways.
In 1979, the Nike Tailwind was acclaimed by runners for its new cushioning under the Air trademark, only to fall apart in the middle of races as bits of metal in the silver dye slit their way through the mesh.
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Assembling the upper does not necessarily require as much labor as the complexity of the project suggests. In the mid-1990s, reporters discovered that of the $70.00 retail price of a
pair of Nike Air Pegasus shoes, production labor accounted for only $2.75, less than a third of the $9.00 needed for the materials. That does not mean that labor is unimportant. The difference in labor costs has slashed the number of athletic shoes produced in North America, and even those labeled “Made in U.S.A.” have components, sometimes including stitched uppers, from around the world. Asia
is especially attractive because of its dense network of suppliers. The Nike Air Max Penny of the mid-1990s had fifty-two components from the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Japan. Using competing sources around the world can provide powerful leverage in pricing and quality control.
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The global footwear market that emerged in the 1970s did more than spread manufacturing. When
factories in the United States closed, it was not only production-line workers who lost their jobs but skilled technicians like the last makers and pattern cutters. Many expert workers went overseas as foremen in the factories of Taiwan and Korea, until local supervisors were trained to replace them. Essential skills supporting design slipped away. The last-making industry had declined from forty-five
U.S. firms producing 6 million pairs of lasts annually in 1920 to three firms making 1.3 million pairs in 1980. Fax machines, spreading from Japan around the world in the 1970s and 1980s, were making it possible to coordinate the assembly and marketing of rapidly changing footwear models for the first time; their electromechanical predecessors, telex machines, had been useless for graphics.
Traditional designers had worked on actual shoe lasts covered with paper and masking tape, which was cut off in sections to create patterns. The inside and outside of the shoe displayed the same structure, following the same paper sections. Now the industry turned to a new set of specialists, industrial designers with no footwear experience. At their disposal was a new technology, computer-assisted
design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), hardware and software that can rapidly translate ideas into prototypes and marketable products. In the 1980s, a number of American and European companies developed CAD/CAM systems for footwear. As usual, the process began with the shoe’s last. But now the design was digitized, painted with a grid representing surface areas and rotated on its lengthwise axis,
each square being converted to computer code. (Bata worked with a Cambridge University professor who developed the algorithm.) Instead of drawing on the actual last with paper and masking tape, a designer could instead transform the electronic last, viewing it from any of more than two dozen positions and experimenting freely with color. Now industrial designers without shoe experience could work
with software models of lasts. The outside of the shoe no longer had to reflect the interior. It was open to fashion.
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