From Hoops To Hipsters

Next Varvatos introduced an All-Star with a manic number of eyelets laced through and through with a stretchy cord. If $100 sneakers are your thing, you could check them out at Varvatos's newish Manhattan boutique. That space, as all hipsters know and are still officially wistful about, used to be CBGB, the venerable punk hole-in-the-wall. One is torn, or goes through the appearance of being torn about this. (If you want to feel even less punk about a shoe purchase, Neiman Marcus also sells Varvatos-designed Converses.)

You might get more of a gloomy, disaffected-teen, suburban-dystopia vibe if you bought a pair at Target, which unveiled its own Converse campaign in February. Or you can buy them in almost any athletic chain, or at little shoe stores in trendy loft-living neighborhoods, or order some online. This covers all the bases, from mundane to insane.

Through all these layers of trend marketing and the co-opting of anticonformity, people who wear Chucks still intuit something in one another. A friend remarked, during the first Internet boom, that the white-collar world was now divided into people who can wear All-Stars (and One-Stars and Jack Purcells) to work every day, and people who aren't allowed to. Graphic design or banking. In the movie business, when you sit down for interviews with film directors or pick up credentials at screening festivals, the first thing everyone does is regard one another's pretty sneakers, and ask where the wearer picked them up. (One never "buys" a pair of hip sneakers. You pick them up, collecting, like a harvest, like they're free. "Fred Segal? Really?")

What is unchanged is the delightful feeling of wearing a pair of Chucks all day, even if some people say it's murder on the arches. Go out in a bright orange pair of Chucks -- the high-tops -- and the trees and flowers seem to sprout in your wake. Go out in a black pair and invite rain clouds and delicious brooding. How is it possible that a shoe can make you feel happy and yet sad, jouncy and yet forlorn, like Joey Ramone and Elvis Costello and Cat Power and Lily Allen all at once?

Broken in, a pair of Chucks offer all the comfort of bedroom slippers, but also the same support, which is why it's so painful to look at old black-and-white basketball: How did those guys ever play in those shoes?

"Basketball players have the worst feet in the world," says Mike Blandini, 77, who worked in the prototype department at Converse's headquarters in North Andover, Mass., for four decades. Chuck Taylor's own weary feet may have been saved by, well, the invention of Chuck Taylors, but every player who came after had a whole new kind of hurt, requiring ever-changing innovations in shoe design. "Larry Bird had a bone spur on his Achilles tendon. I had to go down there and take an impression of [it] and we built the shoe around him. . . . They all had these different problems, and it was legitimate, you really did have to make a [new shoe] for each [athlete]."

Blandini started as a "service boy" in the Converse factory in 1948, and retired from the prototype lab in 1995. By then, All-Stars were being worn by scrawny rockers, One-Stars were being worn by skateboarders and Jack Purcells were being worn by retro-minded writers, artists and preppies. Blandini himself likes a comfy hiking-style shoe that the company now makes, and he keeps a variety of custom All-Stars on hand to wear on special occasions. He has Christmas Chucks and Fourth of July Chucks. Even now he looks at everyone's feet to see what they're wearing.

You look for the Converse person, and pretty soon they walk by -- softly, often slouching. You could go into almost any high school and find an unhappy teenager expressing her angst with a blue Bic ballpoint pen, marking up the sides and soles of her Chucks during geometry class. She does not have a case of March Madness, but she does have a persistent case of lo-fi blues.

Or, thanks to her Chucks, she has that vibe. Whether or not she has Sonic Youth records on vinyl is immaterial. Nobody sells out anymore, because everything's been sold. ( That should be the 100-year sales campaign of the All-Star.) Whatever the first 50 years of Converse meant on the court, the last 50 have been all pose. A sullen and decidedly non-athletic and everlasting pose, in our all-American, foreign-made, rock-and-roll sneakers.