I love these shoes! They’re my favourite ever trainers, and I say this as a thirty-one year old man who has owned one pair of ‘proper shoes’ since leaving school. That is a lot of trainers, running the entire gamut of casual foot-covering styles, from skateboard pretentiousness to faux-classy leatherette things. What makes these shoes so good is the fact that they have a layer of goretex built into them, stopping rain from soaking my feet.
It’s that layer of goretex that makes these shoes worth buying. And I’ve brought two pairs of them, so I should know. I originally brought a pair after a rainy spring, where it seemed like everywhere I went involved getting soaked. It’s no fun going to the pub dripping wet, or leafing through books at the library in your own personal puddle, so I changed the way I dressed and started buying things that used modern fabrics. From that period, I’ve got a few things that suck, a few things that are ok, and a few things that stand out because they are excellent. These shoes stand out.
That’s the deal with using new materials and new technologies. Sometimes, taking a little bit of something new and adding it to the familiar creates excellence. The word for this is ‘progress’, and it’s given us things like dry feet, iPhones, and liquorice allsorts. You might not like everything that comes out of the relentless march of progress, but you’ll have to admit to finding some of it useful.
