So a few months ago I bought a pair of New Balance 90s in the 60 colorway that’s recently been released women’s only in my size range. Totally filmed the unboxing before realizing whether or not that was actually true. Found out halfway through the video and didn’t stop filming because life’s too short to start questioning what gender a shoe is while filming yourself. Put it online. Got called out by my group chat in the way that one guy sent “these are the girl ones right” with no punctuation or caps, which is the most Atlanta thing anyone has ever called me out for.
They fit great. They looked good.
No creepers on the sidewalk verified my gender by checking the box label. Which should’ve been the end of my review, but apparently that’s not allowed to be the entirety of my review because the comments made it some existential statement on what a shoe is purposed for.
The sizing designation is doing all the work you think the gender label is doing here
What nobody tells you before you’re three hundred comments deep into the debate over it: Women’s sneakers almost always just means the same shoe. Same materials, same factory often times, sometimes even same last depending on brand. It only runs smaller through the midfoot, and the numbers start lower and stop sooner than the men’s line. The gender box you find in retailers is just inventory management putting on a dress.
No shoe designer sat down and went we need a shoe for smaller skeletons right now that does fundamentally different things to a guy’s style. They took the existing LAST they use for men’s shoes, cut it thinner in the midfoot, and put women’s numbering on it.
Took me realizing this the hard way by impulsively buying a women’s pair of shoes at full size and a half smaller than I normally wear and blaming that “women’s cuts” were somehow magically changing how shoes fit when they didn’t. It’s not magic, women’s shoes run about a size and a half smaller than men’s regardless of actually fit because of the reasons stated in the previous paragraph, so men’s sized 9 is women’s sized 6 and once you know that you can buy from whichever line cuts in your size without it signifying anything. Guy I know (real_friends_disclosure: not friend friend, guy I used to lift at a gym we’ve both since stopped going to) wears women’s Jordan 1s because his feet are narrow enough that the men’s line always fit like he was wearing his brothers shoes. That’s not making a statement, that’s just wearing shoes that fit correctly.
Where it gets somewhat thorny and I’ll cop to this because I’m not perfect and pretending I’ve never done this would be a lie is with exclusives and colorways. Sometimes they do only drop women’s sizes, high tops or pastels usually for trendy shoes or company anniversaries but that’s inventory and color palette decisions, not male or female bodied people decisions. Every part of the shoe underneath that box is identical to the mens equivalent style, including they LAST its being produced on for all intents and purposes.
Put two pairs side by side and it’s not always even noticeable unless you’re actually checking for it. Tried it myself after I cared enough about what I was talking about to look into it, poured a pair of men’s and womens 90s side by side, same shoe, same size adjusted for the offset and the difference was maybe two millimeters at most through the toe box. Probably nothing if you have skinny feet, but enough to notice and make trying them on before buying worthwhile if you’re somewhere in the middle. Not enough to be two different shoes though.
The part people really care about is completely detached from sneakers
If it’s mostly the exact same shoe with less room in the midfoot and a different number bullet point on an online retailer, why does anyone care about the gender at all? Cause nine times out of ten they didn’t once the shoe was on. It’s some dude’s niece getting a picture of a pink swoosh on foot size 9E in their group chat and another dude being like “YO let me guess skinny bitch bought those” without knowing the drop date, brand, or any of the sneakers tangible features. Gendering a shoe online isn’t analysis, it’s reflex.
I’ve done it too when I wasn’t paying attention. Truth. When it comes down to it the honest answer to every THESE ARE FOR GIRLS/WOMEN response I’ve seen or received is … I don’t know? I didn’t look, they looked good online and fit when I tried them on. Discussion doesn’t need to continue past that in my opinion.
The things that actually dictate whether a shoe “looks gay” or “looks cool” on a man are almost entirely dictated by what you wear it with and how you wear it. I’ve put pastel sneakers that were technically womens only releases with baggy jeans and dad socks and looked masculine as fuck wearing sneakers. I’ve also put on aggressively marketed mens Nike whites with incorrect proportions to my body and looked like I was trying to cosplay I didn’t understand. In neither situation did the gender box matter. How I broke my pants and chose my socks did everything.
There’s also the inescapable fact that trends don’t sell clothes they way they used to care about that box. Hell half the shoes popping now were womans exclusives at one point; certain New Balances in low tops, some Samba colorways.
Menswear cannibalized them all within a year of release because they looked cool and were cheaper, womens sizes runs sneakers at a straight up discount in a lot of cases because of box sizing. Culture war isn’t painting that as oppression and pretending like your precious Tucker Kick light bones are being sold out from under you, it’s realizing there’s a better priced option and not questioning it. That’s honestly the right answer most times.
I know the box matters to some people, obviously it does. Hell it matters to me sometimes. But not wearing a shoe because it came from the “other section” and actually throwing on something to see if it looks weird is literally a ten minute task. Feel out of place in them for that long and take them back. But try them on. The difference between “do these fit?” and “is this a women’s shirt” isn’t as wide as the internet likes to make it seem, most of you can walk that gap in about ninety seconds.
Jamie is in his early twenties, lives in Manchester and makes menswear content for a living. He writes about whatever’s actually trending this week, fast and a bit chaotic, and he’ll happily tell you when he got it wrong.
