These shoes should’ve stayed in the ’80s

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This article was published 15/09/2018 (2879 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK — There was no good reason for Escada to send high-top, pastel-coloured sneakers down its spring 2019 runway Sunday afternoon. Those sneakers were not cool and they were not ironically ugly. They weren’t even so horribly grotesque as to make an intellectual argument about the definition of beauty, the rules of dress or some crazy esoteric point about gender or age or heck, the meaning of life.

They were just ugly.

But they did manage to underscore the fact that fashion companies are run by people, and people — no matter their age or background or store of good common sense — are not immune to peer pressure. And so when Escada celebrated 40 years of giving women suits in chipper colours and dressing them for the workday, it did so by offering up sneakers that look like giant, squishy marshmallows, and it did so mostly because fashion has declared sneakers cool.

The problem with the Escada sneakers, aside from the fact that they looked like a stack of Ladurée macarons, is that they were paired with suits cut in an ‘80s silhouette, when jackets had squared-off shoulders and a boxy torso and were paired with knee-length skirts. Throw on gold chain belts and a few glittering brooches, and designer Niall Sloan made the models look as though they should be traipsing to the subway with teased-out hair and listening to Carly Simon singing Let the River Run on their Walkman.

It’s an admirable mission to cater to “working girls,” and more designers should, but those office stalwarts deserve clothes that make them look accomplished and relevant and ready for the next rung up the corporate ladder and not like they are stuck in a time of floppy disks, pagers and Taylor Dayne.

The brand, founded by Margaretha and Wolfgang Ley, was named after a racehorse, and the collection includes shirts in racing silks and prints of jockeys atop sprinting horses. But the broad strokes of the collection are pure 1980s, not a reimagined version of the decade known for its Wall Street greed and runway ostentatiousness, but a near-historical re-enactment of the era.

Fashion loves looking backwards for inspiration. Lots of designers do it. And do so to great effect. But just because the crowd is rifling through the past, doesn’t mean Escada should, too.

— Washington Post