Kanye West and the trend of designer galoshes How a rubber boot has become the new cult object of luxury footwear

Last Sunday Kanye West brought his Sunday Service to livestraming, with a show that had as guests Justin Bieber and Marilyn Manson raising the controversy about the accusations made against the rock singer. For the occasion, the choir and the three singers were entirely dressed in white and wore the Balenciaga Crocs Boot already seen at Ye's feet on several occasions during the last few months, especially during his lunch in New York with Anna Wintour and during his recent visit to Berlin. Last Sunday's show, however, was almost an official consecration of the new status of "cult object" of the boot, which has now become part of the official uniform of the Sunday Service Choir, but already appeared almost everywhere in recent years after their appearance in the FW20 show of Bottega Veneta in February 2020, even reaching the feet of celebrities opposite each other such as Bella Hadid and Greta Thunberg. In fact, the Balenciaga Crocs Boot as well as the Puddle Boot by Bottega Veneta are very similar to each other and represent the arrival point of a long gestation that began with the trend of chunky shoes, has collected both the suggestions of the outerwear world and those of futuristic footwear without laces transforming the common rubber boot into gardening in the most avant-garde category of luxury footwear.

The brilliant operation behind the creation of the Balenciaga Crocs Boot lies precisely in taking a culturally very "warm" product and giving it a hyper-recognizable twist using the silhouette of the Crocs, now associated with Gvasalia and Balenciaga, to incorporate into the aesthetics of its brand one of the symbolic pieces of another, the Puddle Boot by Bottega Veneta, which is in turn a pillar of the ugly chic aesthetic. The process, however, also gives us a glimpse of the nature of the new creative processes of fashion in the era of large conglomerates: if Demna has been able to create a product so close to the original of another brand, using practically the same famous shade of green, it is precisely because in the ecosystem of these titans of the luxury industry the same product can be taken up and modified to accommodate new meanings and signifiers,  and become part of the language of more than one designer without apparent continuity.