The right pair of trainers is a passport to happiness. I learnt this lesson as a 13-year-old boy, watching a tennis match at my local courts. I absent-mindedly glanced down to admire my brand new blue suede Converse One Stars, and when I looked up there was a pretty -and older -girl, also, remarkably, gazing at my footwear.
"Nice trainers," she said, quietly. I wasn't a confident, experienced, or particularly attractive teen, but she took my hand, and within about 90 seconds we had shuffled behind a large screen of flapping green canvas, and she was furnishing me with the longest unbroken snog of my fledgeling sexual career. I wore the rubber soles of those Converse into crepe paper, convinced that they might one day cast their spell again.
They never did, of course, but a book published this week entitled Sneakers: The Complete Collectors' Guide, illustrated with more than 180 models from the 1960s onwards, is a good reminder of just how magical these stitched-up bits of rubber and fabric really are. Although Sneakers limits itself to straightforward footwear pornography, along the way it sheds some light on how they have become such an inextricable and potent part of youth culture. If you can unravel the strands of sneaker DNA and decode the rows of trainer binary, you're on your way to understanding the covetable and lucrative secrets of cool.
"Sneakers", the American term, is undeniably cooler than the British "trainers".
We, in our dutiful, three-laps-around-the-playing-field way, train; the Americans, in their stealthy, street-walking style, sneak. It's surprising that we haven't adopted their term: for youths on both sides of the Atlantic the sports shoe has become almost entirely divorced from its genesis on the race-tracks of Bolton, where Foster's leather Running Pumps were first produced in 1905. Big brands such as adidas and Nike maintain that they make "performance" and not "fashion" products -billed as the world's most advanced shoe, the Pounds 175 adidas 1, with a microprocessor to adjust the cushioning, went on sale last month.
But if Abebe Bikila could win the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome barefoot -even over cobbled streets -there can be little justification for this kind of high-tech gadgetry, especially on pavements or dancefloors. Today, trainers are mainly worn by young people to express their individuality and (somewhat paradoxically) their allegiance to particular urban tribes.
My own relationship with trainers is entwined with several major "alternative" movements of the past decade. After the Converse One Stars were reluctantly consigned to the shed, I got into hip-hop and basketball. I had a subconscious yearning to be black: to dunk like Jordan and to lounge like Snoop. It was hopeless: I'm an awkward lounger and the only time I tried to dunk I twisted my ankle and cried.
But I got somewhere with the sneakers: a sky-blue and white pair of perfectly contoured high-top Reeboks. I was unwittingly buying into an established triumvirate, dating back to the striking black and red Nike Air Jordan I basketball shoe of 1985. An instant phenomenon, it marked the beginning of one of the most lucrative sponsorship deals in sporting history, and imprinted sneakers on to the global consciousness.
A year later, hip-hop joined the club, with the New York trio Run DMC's hit single My adidas, an ode to a chunky leather basketball shoe called the adidas Superstar. When the bods at adidas marketing heard the line: "We make a good team my adidas and me", they agreed, and signed up Run DMC. The following year their US profits shot up by $35 million. The cross-breeding continues: Dizzee Rascal was endorsed by Nike after name checking them on his 2003 single Fix Up Look Sharp, while the American rap behemoths Jay Z and 50 Cent brandish their Reeboks on the backs of London buses.
After a year of being picked last for basketball games, I picked up a skateboard.
My pitiful attempts at kick-flips in Walton-on-Thames shopping centre might have elicited jeers from passing nine-year-olds, but at least I had a sweet pair of Etnies -a thick, white, padded, rounded trainer bought with my mother in a shop that was so cool (and costly) that I could hardly do up my laces for nerves.
Skating shoes began with the iconic canvas $6 Vans in the 1970s, and have since advanced in both price and durability. Nevertheless, a good skateboarder will wear out a pair in a few months, by scraping it against the rough deck of his board while pulling tricks. Mine, sadly, lasted several years. The skateboard joined the One Stars in the shed.
Britpop was my next obsession: a scene populated by kids who looked as if, like me, they were probably rubbish at skateboarding and basketball. Just as the music arced back to the 1960s, so did the shoes, and the trainer du jour was the classic suede triple-striped 1968 adidas Gazelle.
Every month you could find my friends and me pogoing along to Supergrass at Guildford Civic Hall, spilling Fosters on our Gazelles. But this heady era was also one of trainer warfare, as we defined ourselves against the Ralph Lauren-shirted wearers of pristinely white Reebok Classics. The Reebok Classic is a mean-spirited, pokey shoe, and its owner, as we discovered, might conceivably want to hit you.
When I arrived at university Britpop was dying, and guitar music started looking to the punk and new wave of 1977-84 for inspiration. My own inspiration came in the form of a pair of red low-top canvas Converse All Stars. The Converse All Star (launched in 1917 and nicknamed the Chuck in honour of the basketball star Chuck Taylor) is the bestselling sneaker yet: adorning everyone from 1950s kids (see Stand By Me) to 1990s grunge icons (Kurt Cobain), they have never quite gone out of fashion.
But when the Strokes emerged in 2001, in their ripped drainpipe jeans and scruffy All Stars -referencing the New York Chuck-chic of the Ramones and Blondie -the sneakers began once again to fly out of the shops. Their clean lines, rubber toe-caps, white stitching, and numerous colours and variations (384 at last count) have made them a classic, pliable into all sorts of meanings and expressions. There's nowhere you would feel out of place in a pair of Chucks at least, nowhere worth going.
But, jolly as a room full of All Stars might be, how do you get noticed? Limited editions, that's how. Companies frequently make just a few hundred pairs of one particular model, drop them in the shops in a "quick strike", and watch them disappear overnight. The result: several smug pairs of feet, and eye-watering brand desirability. When, a couple of months ago, after a fortnight of phone calls and internet searches I found one of the few remaining pairs of Nike Air Vengeance, I became a triumphant "quick strike" victim.
These shoes sound extreme -with their turquoise side-patch and purple laces -but my God they are beautiful. When I tried them on I felt like Cinderella with her slipper. I had reached sneaker nirvana and it seemed, from days spent anxiously scanning the feet of those around me, the gates had shut behind me.
But in the world of trainers, for consumer and producer alike, complacency is fatal. Two weeks ago, chatting to my girlfriend in the pub, I glanced behind me at a man leaning against the bar. My eyes widened, and I choked on my drink, spluttering and cursing. "What's the matter?" asked my girlfriend, with genuine concern. I pointed at the man's feet. Vengeance.
FOOT NOTES
Sneakers: The Complete Collectors' Guide by Unorthodox Styles (Thames & Hudson, Pounds 16.95; offer Pounds 13.59 from 0870 1608080) Sneakers: Size Isn't Everything by Milk (Booth-Clibborn Editions): coffee table sneaker heaven.
Trainers by Neal Heard (Carlton): out in paperback next month.
www.crookedtongues.com: news and reviews from Unorthodox Styles
