The Buckle Stopped Pretending

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There is a word on these sandals that tells you almost everything, and it is not the one written across the straps.

It is Fussbett. German for footbed. The word belongs to a particular kind of shoe: cork, contoured, sold on the promise that it is good for your feet and will outlast several fashions. The Fussbett sandal is the closest thing footwear has to an anti-status object. People buy them precisely because they are not trying.

Loewe Type Fussbett sandals, $1,250 at NET-A-PORTER. Tap to view.

Loewe has taken that shoe, kept the crossover straps and the sensible footbed, and lined the front with oversized silver buckles. They are called the Type Fussbett, they cost $1,250, and they come in suede and vegetable-tanned calfskin.

Now stand closer

From across a room they are buckles. Good ones, slightly oversized, the sort of hardware you would expect on a well-made sandal and would not think about again.

Closer: the buckles are letters. L, O, E, W, E.

Then you are near enough to read them, and they are not buckles at all. They are letters. L, O, E, W, E, laid along the strap in order, fastening the shoe while spelling the name of the house.

The model name admits it. Type, as in typography.

Hardware used to have an alibi

For most of the history of luxury, the parts that announced the brand pretended to be doing a job. A buckle fastened something. A clasp closed something. A chain carried something. The signalling was smuggled in under cover of function and everyone agreed not to mention it.

What is clever here is that the alibi has not been abandoned. It has been made to do both jobs at once. These letters genuinely fasten the sandal. The function is real. The name is the mechanism.

Then there is the sole

On the rubber outsole, underneath, is the Anagram. Loewe's abstract monogram, embossed where nobody will ever see it.

So the shoe speaks at three distances. Across a room it says nothing at all. At conversational range it says the name outright. And underneath, where only the pavement can read it, it leaves the mark that means something to people who already know.

Two houses, two directions

It is worth putting these beside the Schiaparelli sneakers we wrote about, because both houses have hidden something on a sole and mean opposite things by it. Schiaparelli prints a footprint underneath so the sole pretends you are barefoot. The deception is the point. Loewe stamps a signature underneath, because the top of the sandal has already done the talking.

Neither is more honest. Quiet luxury is not modesty, it is a password, and the people most committed to it are usually those confident the right audience will recognise them anyway.

Is this creative, or just loud?

Loud is easy. Anyone can enlarge a logo, and a good many houses spent the last decade doing exactly that and calling it design.

What lifts this is the choice of shoe. Your name in silver on an evening sandal would be nothing. Your name on the orthopaedic cork sandal, the one whose entire cultural meaning is that the wearer has stopped caring what anyone thinks, is an actual idea. The object argues with itself, and that argument is the design.

What to do with that

If you like them, buy them because the idea amuses you, which is a perfectly good reason to buy a shoe. Just be clear you are buying a statement rather than a sandal. There are cork footbeds at a tenth of the price that will do the walking just as well and say nothing at all.

And if you dislike them, work out what you object to. Usually it is not the letters. It is being close enough to read them, and what that implies about the person wearing them. Which is the argument the shoe is making, so in a sense it has already won.