How Crocs Changed the World
Staying in school for a big longer, and for a far more upbeat post, we turn to one of Archinect‘s terrific School Blog Project contributors, Mark Faulkner, who is studying at Cooper Union and reporting on his experiences as a student. His most recent post talks about his interest in Crocs, those shoe-like objects that nearly everyone seemed to be wearing these past couple of summers. Faulkner’s interest isn’t of the “Can you believe adults, people who have the right to vote and drive automobiles, are appearing in public wearing these things?” variety, which has long been our very-base reaction to them. Instead, he delves a little deeper, and therein lies the interesting, as he talks about Crocs’ design blurring social constructions and how he’s “been using them as a window of interpretation into our culture and how they relate to our floor surfaces and spaces”:
The continual adaptability of public/private spaces and floor surfaces requires an equally responsive piece of footwear. Crocs are a symbol for our leisure culture and a symbol of adolescent adults. What is the nature of our current public spaces when we are allowed to and can wear Crocs in them? Crocs are the free plan of footwear. They free the barriers of the floor surface; sand to water to hospital, to home, to kitchen, to 5th Ave. No other shoe can achieve such a diversity of surfaces. They democratize footwear and break gender barriers.
Granted, the company may soon be out of business, and seem most certainly to have reached critical mass a while ago, but we have to hand it to Faulkner for looking at how such a piece of design can (did?) transform how society operates, albeit perhaps on micro-levels. Also, he chops one in half and photographs its innards, which is awesome.
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Nadine Cheung
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