ARE “CONVERSE ALL STARS” THE SHOES OF A POLITICAL WINNER?

 

                              ….Kamala Harris arriving in her low-rise Chucks

 

Invented in 1917, Converse All Stars are still going strong

I can still remember when I first met the girl that has been my wife now for over 45 years.  I also remember what was cool for wearing to school for a young teenage boy living in the SF South Bay area.

It was standard 501 blue Levi’s, with the orange stitching blacked out with a felt pen.  It was also a Madras plaid shirt with a button down collar, and of course, combined with black, high rise, Converse All Star shoes.

As we know today, what goes around, comes around, and the Chuck Taylor, Converse All Star shoes have come back very strong.  But this time, they are in both high top and low cut, (Today, called “low-rise”) and they come in a rainbow array of colors.

As it turns out, the Democratic VP candidate, Kamala Harris has been a long-time fan of today’s low-rise, Chuck Taylor, Converse All Stars.

This week, when she arrived for her first solo campaign trip to the 5^th largest city in Wisconsin, Milwaukee, she was wearing a mask, and she didn’t trip coming down her campaign plane’s ramp.  Instead, there was a video sent pinging around the Internet showing what was on her feet.  She was wearing her black, low-rise Chuck Taylor All-Stars.  The classic Converse shoe that has long been associated more closely with “cultural cool,” than most carefully managed, high-profile GOP candidates.

In fact, by the next morning, videos by two reporters witnessing her arrival had been viewed nearly 8 million times on Twitter.  For comparison’s sake, that is more than four times the attention the campaign’s biggest planned video event, a conversation between Joe Biden and Barack Obama, had received on both Twitter and YouTube combined.

Harris’s sister, Maya, also tweeted that Chuck Taylors are, indeed, her sister’s “go-to shoes.”  And a few hours later, Harris’s official campaign retweeted the video with the caption “laced up and ready to win.”

At this point in a presidential campaign, every candidate’s move is calculated, often to offer a sense of youth, and energy and fitness.  This is to reassure voters of a candidate’s ability to handle the rigors of running the country, or helping to do so. In fact, Joe Biden often jogs up the stairs to his plane, or up to the microphone onstage, just to demonstrate his vigor.  He recently wondered aloud about what it meant that President Trump struggled to descend a ramp at one of his events this Summer.  Trump has criticized Biden for not leaving his Delaware basement, while the Trump supporters were being told to question Biden’s mental acuity.  But as it turns out, people are today, questioning Trump’s mental acuity.

As Harris’s sister, who was a former Hillary Clinton adviser and the co-chair of Harris’s former presidential campaign.  She tweeted that Chuck All Stars are a staple of the California senator’s wardrobe.  She wore them regularly on the presidential campaign trail in 2019, showing off a collection she said is several pairs deep.  Harris has white Chucks, off-white Chucks, black Chucks, and it is said that she even have a “sequined pair” that she has yet to break out on the campaign trail.

Once, during an interview with The Washington Post on a bus rumbling through Iowa, Harris explained that she recommends washing the shoes to keep them fresh.   But she was adamant about taking the laces out first to avoid unseemly discoloration from the metal-framed shoe lace holes.

At one of her campaign events last year, a young aspiring artist opened Harris’s campaign event by performing a somewhat, bizarre original song about her own Chuck Taylor's and the importance of being confident in one’s personal style…?

Former presidential campaign staffers circulated a story of a campaign stop at a New Hampshire farm when Harris discovered she had forgotten to bring her Chucks, but the ground was too muddy to move comfortably in heels.  A staffer pulled off her own Converses and gave them to Harris, who wore them through the event, then signed them later as a, Thank You.

Chuck Taylors are hardly a new thing among the fashionable.  They were released in 1917 and named All-Stars in 1919.  In 1921, the company hired professional basketball player, Chuck Taylor, who urged the Converse shoe company to create a more flexible and supportive shoe for the basketball court. His name was added to the shoes in 1934. By the 1960s, they were the main shoe of professional basketball players, though they fell out of use as shoe technology had improved in the 1970s.

Since then, Chuck Taylors have become more of a retro-style street shoe, than an actual athletic asset, and they have remained popular as a cultural signal.  Athletes, actors and musicians wear them regularly, and they maintain a hold in hipster circles, too, particularly in Harris’s native California.

Since people, other than White men, began appearing on presidential tickets, their fashion choices have drawn much too much attention. There have been jabs at Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, and her reliance on them that led a Facebook support group for her to call itself “Pantsuit Nation”.  Then there was the weird scandal that started over the first Black president’s choice of a beige suit color…?

Harris, in her latest turn on the national stage, has tended to break free of the traditional strictures on female candidates to dress like their male counterparts.  She was at the center of a short-lived controversy when some female reporters tweeted pictures and video of the then-presidential candidate trying on a rainbow-sequined jacket at a Black-owned business in South Carolina.

Conservative outlets jumped on the reporters for pointing out the jacket, then they jumped on Harris for obliging their suggestions.  It was six months later, when Harris sported another rainbow jacket at the San Francisco Pride parade, and supporters on the Internet went crazy.

The response to Harris’s “Chucks” was more organic.  They were less forced, than the campaign’s attempts to make logos of Biden’s trademark Aviator sunglasses.  The “Chucks” were trending on Twitter before the campaign adopted them as its own.

“Chuck Taylor’s. Skinny jeans. Suit jacket. First Black woman & first person of Indian descent to be nominated for national office by a major party. Born in Oakland, California (for you birthers). Her first name is pronounced COMMA-lah. Get it straight. American, badass …” tweeted retired basketball player Rex Chapman.

The non-supportive circles seized on the outfit with tweets suggesting Harris is a: “cop in Converses” and similar messages.  But a majority of the most engaged-with tweets on the subject were positive. Some people posted pictures of their own pairs of Converses. Others tweeted that they were online buying some Chuck Taylors of their own.

...Kamala's, white, low-rise Chucks

Converse has declined to offer any details.  They did however, offer the following: “While we’re unable to share specific sales data, we are pleased to see that the Vice Presidential nominee has chosen the Chuck Taylor All Star as a reflection of her personal identity,” the company said in a statement.

Many people cast Harris’s shoes as a sign she is a candidate for an evolving constituency.  At a time when many in the Democratic Party are calling for a different kind of leader, a sentiment that contributed to Biden’s promise to name a woman as running mate.  Harris’s shoes have resonated with those who saw something more familiar in low-rise Chucks than the usual polished men’s wingtips.

“Mike Pence doesn’t even knows what Chuck Taylors are,” tweeted Daniel Uhlfelder, a Florida lawyer.

Whether Kamala is wearing All Stars or Nike’s, she has shown those of us in California that she is a person to not take for granted. 

Let’s just hope that she and Joe replace the authoritarian psychotic liar currently defaming the people’s house in Washington DC.

Copyright G. Ater 2020