5 pairs of shoes that made my blood boil in 2019

It’s the end of the year, essentially. The time of year everyone starts making shitty roundup lists of things that happened in the last twelve months or so. You already saw the title of the article though, so you know I'm doing the same thing. What sets my list apart from the other wack ones is my superior opinion and wit. So without further ado, here are the ten shoes that made me frown the most in 2019 :( :(

Travis Air Force One (2019)

I’m sick of Travis Scott Nikes for real. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t design any of them, they don’t have a singular aesthetic or direction and they exist solely for hype. Travis Scott fans are stupid enough that they’ll think anything with his name attached is the hottest shit since sliced bread. But I digress. These af1s are especially lame. The mix of materials and prints on the upper is something Nike’s been doing for a couple years now and at this point it’s getting old. The whole shoe really just feels like it exists to exist, there’s no story behind it. They basically took a mall AF1 and attached Travis’ name to it. I actually thought these would general release when I first saw them based on how they looked. Very, very lame.

Martine Rose Air Monarch

Ok first of all fuck monarchs period. And the entire dad shoe fad. I needed to get that off my chest. I think the main reason these exist is that Nike wanted a collab to officially enter the dad-shoes-as-streetwear market with, and Martine rose was looking to collab around the same time. There’s nothing you can do to monarchs to make them cool, so I sort of feel bad for whoever had to work with these, but it doesn’t excuse their existence. For some reason Martine Rose took the existing chunky silhouette of the Monarch and added these weird bubbles to the upper. The concept of warping an established shoe isn’t new and I actually think it can be very cool, but the base sneaker needs to be something established for looking good, and that’s why these don’t work. Monarchs are not good looking shoes.

Sean Wotherspoon x Louis Vuitton

Mr. Wotherspoon is a whole other can of worms that I could easily write a separate article about, but I don’t want to keep going off topic. Ever since he successfully captured lightning in a bottle with his AM1/AM97 hybrid last year, every lazy brand in existence has been clambering to put his spin on their lame clothing. They range from decent to ugly. The LV collab is ugly. Every Wotherspoon collaboration is marked by his use of bold color choice, color blocking and... that’s it. He isn’t really a designer, and he isn’t really an artist. He’s what I wanted to be when I was a little kid, just somebody who gives ideas for other people to act on and receives bucketloads of cash in return. No work went into these. LV gave Sean a color-by-numbers picture of the shoes and he got his crayons and went to town. Shameful.

Yeezy 500 high

OK. these are ridiculous to me. I’m a fan of 500’s to the point where I own 2 pairs. Back when the originals were only in the concept phase, DHgate and other off-brand Chinese markets were flooded out with fakes that looked just like these. But even if I had never seen those, the Yeezy 500 highs would still give off the vibe of a chinatown sneaker to me. The concept of taking a shoe that already exists and making it a new model without adding any new original elements is something the Chinese excel at. Many Yeezy releases are simple palette swaps, but the lack of any inspiration in these stands out to me. The bizarre nature of these shoes is further exacerbated by the existence of the Yeezy desert boot, which is already essentially the 500 in high form, but that shoe has enough of its own features to be called its own silhouette.

Jordan 1 Not for Resale

These aren’t just the worst shoes from the past year, they are literally the worst shoes ever. The idea of these shoes existing makes me see red. I don’t care if they came out in December of last year, they came out within less than a year of me writing this and I need to write about these. These sneakers are the root of all evil. The person who designed these knew they were going to resell for a lot, so what’s with the branding? Just cruel irony? It seems like such a smug “fuck you” to people who truly want to wear their shoes. So many pairs of these are sitting on someone’s sneaker clock wall display or in a glass case, or in a storage locker. The colorways themselves aren’t even much to write home about, in fact, the red pair bears a striking resemblance to some Jordan 1s released later this year(that will probably end up reselling for less). To me it feels like these shoes exist to spit in the face of people who honestly want to wear sneakers, and that seems to run antithetical to the original ideology of sneaker culture and streetwear as a whole. I still can’t believe they exist. It feels like some sort of sick joke.