Tevas Are Dope, Fuck You

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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One of the greatest assets you can look for in a piece of clothing is that it provokes an extreme reaction. There's a weird feeling of power that comes with giving people the opportunity to decide if they love or hate you simply by virtue of you draping your body in the most outlandish garments imaginable. This is the entire principle behind those Adidas shoes with wings on them, pants with four legholes instead of two (I swear to Based God I saw some dude wearing that shit in a coffee shop the other day) and that one time Bjork wore a swan to the ESPYs or whatever. At this point, it's rocketed around the sun and past the point of no return to where people wearing outrageous shit is totally normal and non-instigatory. While this is great for people who love wearing crazy ass clothes, this normalizing of the extreme has also kinda killed fashion's ability to provoke, to express, to prod what we consider normative, and do whatever other shit fashion is, like, supposed to do.

In other words, fashion is fucking dead, bro.

So, where does fashion's new punk aesthetic reside, if it even exists at all? If everything crazy is normal, then is everything normal now crazy? Well, no, because that's obvious and #normcore isn't a thing. Instead, you need to reach back, way back into your childhood, when life was simpler and all the security you'd ever need came in the form of a simple pair of velcro straps. That's right friends, I'm talking about motherfucking Tevas.

I bought some Tevas about a month ago, more or less on a whim, and they're easily the most divisive item of clothing I've ever owned. People will either be fucking AMPED that you're wearing them or they seem weirdly personally offended. Honestly, it's pretty great.

The people in Column A (the non-h8r column) are hereby excused from reading this because they already know the rest of this. All you Column B-residing ass h8rz, however, need to stick around because I'm about to put on my Menswear Fedora™ and teach you bitches a thing or two about fashion.

People who get mad about Tevas are, in effect, mad at themselves—mad that their feet are sweating like crazy in the heat, mad that they're not confident enough in their bodies to show their feet to the world, mad that their feet are not equipped to, at the drop of a hat, go climb a motherfucking mountain or go on a nature hike or potentially even engage in hand-to-hand combat on a sand dune. You know, true player shit that all Teva wearers are able to do whenevs.

Yeah, I get it, Tevas are kind of lame, but that's also why they're kind of perfect. They're the footwear equivalent of that giant La-Z-Boy you fought tooth and nail with your girlfriend to keep in the house. Yes, they're ugly as shit, but with Tevas, it's not about anyone else. It's about you, your comfort and your preference. Strapping a pair of Tevas onto your feet lets the world know that you'll be humming along with absolutely zero fucks left in your fuck-giving tank, and if the rest of the world doesn't like it, they can go jump in a hole. That sort of confidence scares people. Wearing Tevas tells the world you've unplugged from the bullshitty matrix that is society at large. The only real limits are in your mind. And wearing Tevas proves that you've already shattered them.

Drew Millard wrote this while gone off that liquified rubber. You can read more of his work on Noisey and follow him on Twitter here.

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