Marketing all-stars

For a while, Converse had no idea. It made the same shoe it had always made, that utilitarian model they called “Chuck Taylors.” They were canvas and designed for people who wanted to protect their feet, but that was basically it. They weren’t stylish; they weren’t expected to be. They were just average shoes.\nBut during high school, I found myself in the midst of this trend, where everything uncool was suddenly ironic and therefore extremely cool. Somehow, in this abysmal renaissance, Converse found its ugly shoes at the front lines of style. I don’t really know many scene kids – I can’t fairly say why this is – but most people who support Ron Paul and listen to “Bright Eyes” too much all basically decided unilaterally that Chuck Taylors were awesome.\nAnd for a while, Converse was content to let its unexpected success ride out. But I was watching TV not too long ago and happened upon a commercial – a faded out, slightly pixilated advertisement for something unrelated in the background, with a marquee about how commercials were designed by people who didn’t know what it was like to be you asking you to “buy into the system.” After this message, essentially rejecting the media, Converse made clear it had sponsored the ad. What was once a shoe company had now taken moral education into its hands; apparently the company hopes you will buy its product when you reflect on the inherent soullessness of capitalism.\nIt seems Chuck Taylors are the subject of two distinct kinds of irony – the irony that a shoe is so uncool that it’s fashionable, and the irony that people are buying things from a company whose marketing strategy is to insist that marketing is evil. Of the former, people are well aware, but the latter provides enjoyment to society at large. Buying shoes from a company that sold you your vaguely alternative, brand-name friendly counterculturalism is like wearing leopard skins branded with the message “Poaching is bad.”\nAnd it’s not that I buy into this sophomoric, anti-consumerism nonsense. It’s that I dislike seeing our generation’s ideas and societal trends being handed to us in neat little packages. As much as I dislike hippies – and I’m a man who dislikes hippies – at least they chose their statement. I suppose every generation has to be allowed its indulgent causes, to err in its eventual progression toward a sound and inwardly coherent philosophy. But even if a former hippie finds a seat on the board of trade, he does it because he figured it out for himself. He wasn’t pushed there by advertising trends that one day told him to go to Woodstock and the next day told him to go to Harvard Business School. And really, whenever I see someone involved in a protest against something I believe to be good, it’s comforting to think that if this person ever figures it out, it’ll be because he did some thinking on his own.