I was in Foot Locker on 34th Street looking at two boxes that were identical except for one having the word “women’s” printed on the side, and the man at the register told me that “the women’s were on backorder, might be weeks, might be months.” Same cut. Same tread pattern. Same model name printed below the barcode on the side. The only thing that was different about the mens’ pair was that they were in stock right now, they were my size, and they were twelve dollars cheaper than their feminine equivalent. I bought the men’s pair. That was three years ago, and I haven’t actively considered buying women’s sneakers since.
I don’t mean to pretend that this was some kind of ethical stance on my part, some grand statement against corporations telling me what sneakers I should or shouldn’t wear based on the bedrooms I slept in as a teenager.
I wasn’t political about it until long after I started doing it, because initially it really wasn’t that deep. I had planned on buying shoes that Saturday, I had the cash, and the only version of the shoe I wanted was not sold to me. So I bought the other version instead. Then I kept buying the other version because every time it happened it bugged me just as much as the first time, and around pair four I didn’t even think about it anymore and just bought mens sneakers because that was how I rolled.
I Did Some Research Because That’s How I Rolled
I track cost-per-wear on pretty much every item of clothing I own. It’s a weird hobby, I know, but you build up a tolerance to these things after a while. I learned early on that, for the exact same release, same materials, same designer, sometimes even same factory workers, the men’s sneakers would run me anywhere from ten to twenty dollars less than the women’s would. Not a margin of error. Not a weird one-time thing I could convince myself was different if I tried hard enough. An entire goddamn dollar-sign repeated season after season, release after release because someone someplace decided that was how they were priced.
The price isn’t even what bothered me most, to be honest. It was the fit. I bought a pair of women’s running shoes like a year before I started Just Fucking Buying Men’s Shoes all the time, and after four months of NORMAL USE the sole began to separate from the upper. Not “I wore these while jogging through drainage ponds” kind of wear, I literally just wore them when I needed shoes and took them off when I didn’t. Shoved them into my bag so they got scuffed up when I hauled around sweaty equipment for funsies in the summers. Mostly just walked to the train and back. But they fell apart and the guys’ version did not. I looked up reviews for the exact same model (same colorway, too!) and you do not see that problem crop up once in men’s. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
I emailed customer service. That’s how anal-retentive I am about this stuff, not how informed. I didn’t even know what the problem was yet, I just knew my kicks were garbage and will suck at holding onto my feet longer than a month now. They told me something about gender specific lasts being different blah blah cannot deliver the women’s version of this shoe to me in the same condition because magic pussy, which is customer service-speak for “we know there’s a problem but we don’t want to refund you.”
I don’t have an answer for it either, not unless I dig up the email and skim through a month’s worth of correspondence between me and some type-bot at [email protected] but truthfully I don’t care anymore. The data I care about, the spreadsheet I keep in excel that now has eleven rows for kicks I own is enough for me. Cost, purchased date, still wearing them? Super comfy? Do not recommend? Every single pair that fell apart before they should have is in the women’s buying column. I don’t need double-digit samples for my behavior to be validated, but eleven is enough to not buy women’s sneakers anymore.
The Women’s Colourschemes Were Worst Than Even Being Charged More
I want to talk about colour because, dear god, don’t get me started on colour. The options you get handed when you’re buying women’s sneakers are almost never better than what the men’s line gets. I mean, they can be! Rainbow may be the default unspoken mens shoe colour, but they’re not ubiquitously cast in Bone. The women’s line gets the stupid colours, theads you know were built in the design team’s nightmares. Pastels. Rose gold fucking stamps. You know how sometimes a brand will take a popular men’s shoe and make a special white woman’s-only version? That white shoe with the women’s heel tab always has more glitter on it.
Except for the mens line got the nice black shoe to begin with.
My friend Danielle works in visual merchandising for a major sneaker brand (shall remain unnamed, but message me if you’re curious) and she said it’s not even PC at this point, they “offer womens customers a ‘safe’ color because men will still buy the attractive colorway but women will buy the men’s shoe if they think it’s pretty.” Laughable, right? Except every brand does it. They bank on me complaining about the rose gold streaker lines on my white Nike downslops but just wearing the gray ones instead.
The real reason I stopped buying womens shoes altogether, scrub past all the financial justification and logical decisions I made about it, was the feeling I got every time I was shoe shopping. The feint echo of But this is the woman’s line! As if putting “women’s” on a shoe magically meant it was something I should want just because other women wanted it. But the things I wanted were there, one shelf over, cheaper, better built, and not pink. Trust me when I say that dealing with a snugger fit in the toe box is nothing compared to just wearing the fucking cool shoes.
I’ve sized up half a shoe size to avoid buying womens sneakers eleven times now. I will forty times more if I have to.
Ade works in finance in the City and treats his wardrobe like a portfolio, which he admits is a slightly mad way to think about a blazer. He writes about office clothes that survive twelve hour days, back to back meetings and the odd video call.
