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What is it about Converse shoes everyone always has to fetishize? America is asking itself on the hundredth anniversary of the company, which is not actually a company but a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nike Inc., not that you care, because you understand; these things happen. As Hank Stuever says: "It is not an angry shoe. It was never that kind of rebellion. It's the shoe of slacker ambivalence, indecision." It is a matter of public record; sometime in the nineties the nation's footwear industry relocated itself in southern China and Jakarta, and around that time I happened to be a kid in southern China; it was hard — shit, maybe even wrong — to begrudge the undernourished Chinese those smelly jobs making the shoes all the cool kids wore; and even in the teensy expatriate youth community of Guangzhou circa 1991 there were cool kids, whose parents worked for Nike and outfitted them with all manner of different colored Jordans and Huaraches and even — my parents found this to be the most unnecessary phenomenon — Aqua Sox. More »
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