Kate Zambreno

"Do you carry Uggs?" a woman asks the shoe salesman at Nordstrom, with just a tinge of desperation. He shakes his head. All out until April, just like everyone else. He then turns to me, as we've been chatting while I've browsed. "Why would you want to get something that everyone else has?" he asks. I smile conspiratorially, knowingly, haughtily even. Those fashion lemmings.

I don't know why I didn't come out of the closet right then and there, or more accurately, admit that I had my own pair of size 8 black Uggs waiting in my closet at home. I mean, I was at Nordstrom, the shoe emporium, and saying I caught the Ugg bug, so to speak, is similar to confessing you're Catholic at church. So why was I so sheepish about owning these sheepskin Australian boots with the toasty fur-lined interior?

First, let me tell you a story. High school, 1992, freshman year, locker room. I'm changing after gym next to Jenny Marini, the trend navigator of St.Viator's, who always wore blue eyeshadow up to her plucked eyebrows. I have one foot up on the bench, tying my shoelaces, when Jenny suddenly wrinkles her nose towards my brown loafers. "Don't you roll your pants?" she exclaims with the deepest displeasure. She then proceeds to demonstrate the fold and roll, tossing her bleached blonde hair over one shoulder as she concentrates on an exacting tight roll of her pleated khaki Z. Cavaricci's past her thick socks and up her skinny ankles.

This was the moment of truth. Roll or let the cuffs of my navy blue Dockers swing awkwardly against my white socks? Acquiesce or rebel? I made a quick decision based on my irritation with Jenny's apparent sense of superiority. "I don't want to," I say. And an iconoclast was born.

I've always avoided being a brand whore. I usually don't want what everyone else has. But then I found myself coveting the ubiquitous ugly sheepskin boots everyone refers to by their first name, and now I'm shamefully Step-footing out on a regular basis, same as blonde starlet #344, same as Oprah, same as no doubt Jenny Marini somewhere. You might as well just slap a Juicy Couture sweatsuit on me and I'm ready for my close-up and acrylics. That's what the guilty part of me feels, when I'm not luxuriating around in my Ugg-clodden hooves. In fact, I was so enamored with my Uggs I wore them every day for two months straight, even when the black fur dyed my feet.

Everywhere you go you see the classic tan thin-soled shearling boots that have become shorthand for a sort of bohemian sorority girl image. I have had numerous conversations about the footwear and their proper care and protection. It's like we're all clomping around with Cabbage Patch Kids stuck to our feet.

"There are people who are literally losing their minds over Ugg boots," says Monica Yost, who opened up her Wicker Park shoe boutique M.Y. Steelo around Halloween, when many other stores had already sold out of stock. She unloaded her fifty pairs of Uggs in just two weeks, she says, with the exception of a lonely size 11 black pair still waiting for some large-footed fashionista. In fact, even though Uggs have been around for years, demand has only reached a media-fueled hysteria since the fall.

Yost says she gets fifty to sixty phone calls a day from all over the world from desperate shoppers like the woman I observed at Nordstrom, Uggs coveters who have been shelling up to $400 on Ebay, shunning the many quite good knockoff shearling boots out there. "I think they really want that Ugg name," says Yost.

What makes Uggs so irresistible? For some guidance, I called up my sister Sara in Los Angeles. She first started wearing Uggs a few years back, following the lead of fellow surfers in California who wear the slipper-like boots to keep their feet warm after they've been in the ocean. As always, Sara is also practical in explaining Uggs' appeal. "They're really soft."

They are warm. And soft. So soft. A male friend who originally sneered that they looked like "moonboots" changed his mind when he tested the womb-like interior of my Uggs, exclaiming, oh-so-delicately, that to plunge into an Ugg is akin to "sticking your foot into a polar bear's ass." They are that comfortable. And I appreciate my winter boots even more in January's arctic temps. "In this city it makes sense. It's cold here," says Yost. Perhaps Ugg boots have caught on because women want to be warm, and are sick of suffering for fashion, stomping in ice puddles in unpractical boots and breaking in pointy heels with Band-Aids.

A manager at a restaurant I once worked in, a Canadian named Angelo, despite an obsession with various conspiracy theories, once gave two sound pieces of advice. One, he said, always buy name-brand orange juice. And two, always wear comfortable shoes.

And if the comfortable shoes are name-brand, even name-dropped brand, is that such a bad thing? Is it?

(2004-01-06)

Also by Kate Zambreno

Tip of the Week
Traveling misadventures have turned themselves nicely into creative fodder for members of the Neo-Futurists theater company
(2003-12-10)

Valley of the Dolls
Samantha is an American Girl Doll, one of the numerous such dolls getting their hairs braided, upswept and ponytailed atop a counter-sized salon...
(2003-12-02)

Give up!
In its most cynical form, the holiday retail Olympics can be reduced to a giant game of "If you show me yours, I'll show you mine."
(2003-11-26)

Tip of the Week
A three-dimensional ballerina projected onto a fourteen-foot screen begins 2002's "Amelia," choreographed by Montreal virtuoso Édouard Lock...
(2003-11-19)

Tip of the Week
(2003-11-13)

Tip of the Week
(2003-11-05)

Red Scare
(2003-11-05)

Fun with plastic
(2003-10-29)

Rainbo blue
(2003-10-16)

Window shopper
(2003-10-16)

Rodan
(2003-10-16)

Dr. Laura
(2003-10-02)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment