Wear Your Sambas on the Road Less Traveled

I first learned the divine law of supply and demand from my fourth-grade History textbook. It clicked pretty easily, seemed pretty straightforward. But today, I realised it must not have settled in. Since December of 2023, I’ve owned a pair of low-top Saucony Jazz Courts, all white with black soles. No shoe I’ve ever owned has been quite like them. I’ve had the Club C 85’s, I’ve had the Continental 80’s (those were pretty great), I’ve had the Forums and I’ve even gone so far as to try on my dad’s Stan Smiths. And all but the latter I’ve worn until I could no longer.

My friends say, “dude they’re literally all the same f***ing shoe.” They know nothing. And they never could know that nothing — nothing — compares to the Jazz Court. So today, upon reflection that these battered shoes, that I’ve worn just about every day since I got them, stink too much to go on, I decided I would do something I’ve never done before. I would go back to buy the same model.

I’ve never even kept a relationship up for more than a year. For the first time I, a suburban American son, had found my one true love: a fifty-dollar pair of unassuming trainers. This was not commodity fetishism, it was commodity adoration. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I scoured the US and UK websites for a jazz court and found nothing. I knew they hadn’t been the most popular, but it couldn’t be true, could it? They couldn’t really have killed it off, and left in its place some chunky suede slipper disguised as a 'lifestyle shoe' that dared call itself the Jazz Original. I served in Jazz originals. I knew Jazz originals. The Jazz original was a friend of mine. You, tech-startup-project-manager-dj-on-the-weekends-duplex-in-Brooklyn-Heights-“I-was-born-in-Brooklyn”-but-you-mean-LIJ-and-that’s-in-Queens-Cinderella-stepper, you are no Jazz Original.

But they had. I even turned to my therapist, Chat-GPT, for confirmation. And it was true. Production had stopped, but the limited inventory that was left would be sold off until the Jazz Court faded into unmemory, recorded scarcely in personal photos and the odd r/footwearfriday post.

This shouldn’t have been as upsetting as it was, but my awareness of that only made it more upsetting. You see, I had defeated myself. As much as I hate to admit it, I bought those shoes precisely because I knew nobody knew what they were. I was the hipster, at least I was trying to be, and only for myself — nobody really takes notice of which whitewashed trainers you’re wearing. I am the “I-was-born-in-Brooklyn”-dj-on-the-weekend guy, and I was born at LIJ. Here I sat, head in my hands, because I had somehow let myself fall in love with this empty canvas, over which someone had probably truly suffered for a fraction of the $50 I paid on the other end.

I am the problem. My own narcissistic, miniature protest against the footwear mainstream led me to attach some piece of my identity to a cheap assembly of fabrics, whose very unpopularity took it off the market after it had become a part of my overdeveloped personal narrative. And in some cruel twist of fate, I came to like them for just what they were. They suit me better than any shoe I’ve had before, even though I’ve got double-wide feet, and they’re versatile and comfortable and honestly, they’ve come to feel like home. But now, they’re at death’s door forever.

I’ll still wear the pair I have left until the thin layer of rubber at the balls of my feet opens up straight to my heart. But next time, if I don’t want to succumb to trends, I won’t let them tell me what not to buy.

So if you need me, I’ll be outside of Taste, sipping a coffee in my navy car coat, blue jeans, ACNE scarf, and some red-and-purple Sambas.

Image from Wikimedia Commons