Up until 2007, if you wanted to listen to music you plugged your headphones into an MP3 player. If you wanted to reach someone you called their flip phone. And if you wanted to look for a flight you waited until you got to your desk and pulled up a Yahoo! Travel search page. It took the genius of Steve Jobs and Apple to smoosh all those capabilities and more into a single device that you could not only carry in your pocket, but looked good to boot. And the world has not been the same since.
Combining two or more things successfully into a new winning pairing is tough, though easier in some fields than others. With food there are multiple examples: spaghetti and meatballs, rum and Coke, chocolate and peanut butter. Some twofers are outside of the mainstream but still have found a following, like olive oil ice cream, or chicken and waffles. And still others try for a toehold but never really land. Some say the combination of Pepsi and milk or "Pilk" tastes like a melted ice cream float. Others say it just tastes like, well, pilk.
The one other area where that kind of invention works is fashion. In fact, the very essence of that field is to take existing garments and styles and combine them in new and interesting ways. As with edibles, there are some examples which might have seemed revolutionary at first but now are as classic as a blazer. Witness the whole athleisure trend, whereby items worn for sports have been retailored and restyled to be donned every day in almost every situation. Or hybrids such as the shacket (jacket and shirt), jeggings (jeans and leggings) or the relatively new coatigan (coat and cardigan) have each found a following. In each case two disparate items or looks were bolted onto one another, run through a blender and emerged as a distinctly unique item, at first scorned and derided, and later accepted as part of the fashion canon.
Occasional individual brands try and do the same thing, taking their signature attributes and grafting them onto line extensions. Ugg used to be a generic term for a rough looking sheepskin boot from Australia before it became a global footwear powerhouse. Not content to rest on its cushy wintertime soles, there are now Ugg slippers and sandals in various materials, heights and styles. The same goes for Burberry or Coach. While their origin was in a very specific item, now you can get that name and look on a not just a scarf or handbag, but on a hat or pair of kicks, neither of which leaves any doubt as to its original pedigree.
And then there's Crocs. Founded in 2002 as a floatable shoe for water-based activities, the brand has grown to become a consumer darling. These days you can get the classic clog-styled closed-cell foam shoe in a myriad of colors and variations. There's the open-toed sandal version like the Mega Crush, or a wedge like the Brooklyn Tortoise. Each tweaks the original design while retaining the basic anatomy of the brand to give you footwear more appropriate for other activities.
But in what might be a Croc too far comes a special release as part of the company's "Croctober" promotion. While there are boot versions of the original, they are shorties which seem like they might make sense on a rainy day. Not so much for this latest frankenfootie. For the low price of $120 you can purchase the limited edition Classic Crocs Cowboy Boot, which "features a signature Crocskin texture, metallic disco desert embroidery details, and a spinning spur on the back so you can really kick up some dirt." One reviewer described them as "love child of John Wayne and the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. They're so confused about their identity that they've become the fashion equivalent of an existential crisis."
In a 1977 episode of the sitcom "Happy Days," the Fonz jumps over a live shark on water skis. It was taken as a sign that the series was trying too hard to attract attention, a condition thereafter referred to as "jumping the shark." Has the shoe company tried a little too hard and jumped the Croc? Your call, but perhaps other footwear is in order if you are going to Texas.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford does not own any pair of Crocs. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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