Irony, Agency & the Destructible Espadrille

In my headphones: Dire Straits—Communiqué (1979) and Bob Dylan–Under the Red Sky (1990)

Traveling around the Mediterranean with my family two summers ago, I shopped with one goal in mind: To buy a pair of espadrilles. I saw the American versions as knock-offs, and I wanted to go straight to the source, which just happened to be Spain, which just happened to be a stop on the family itinerary, and where we just happened to be on a Sunday, the one day of the week Spain’s historic flea market, El Rastro, is open. Imagine my luck!

Happily, I found mountains of espadrilles upon my arrival. With prices as low as seven euros per pair, the treasure hunt was on. I sat on the curb for half an hour, trying on pair after pair of mislabeled espadrilles and lamenting the state of my Spanish. Now, if I was buying them today, I would have bought them in red and navy, but that’s beside the point; I bought a black pair and a light grey pair. Let it be known they were not necessarily well-made; they were cheap shoes and looked like cheap shoes, but that was part of their charm! Unsurprisingly, I wore my black espadrilles literally into the ground–the rubber soles flaked off as I walked and littered the imaginary footprints in my wake. Packing my suitcase to return home two weeks later, the sole of my right espadrille was hanging by a thread, and the black canvas fabric was trying to bust loose at the seams.

I decided to keep my second pair untouched for the rest of the summer, only wearing them when the situation absolutely demanded it (read: making a sophisticated European entrance my freshman fall of college), until the following summer when I was packing for my study abroad program in Morocco. I lived in the country’s coastal capital and needed shoes to carry me from the cobblestoned Old Medina to the beach a few blocks away; since I detest flip flops and can barely tolerate Birkenstocks, I wore my destructible espadrilles… this was before I (A) learned that going to the beach in Rabat as a woman is even less enjoyable than you think it is and (B) stepped in my first combination of fish guts/cat excrement/butcher stall runoff in my espadrilles and immediately felt an unidentifiable squishiness in my jute soles. After weeks of twice-a-day three-block treks along the Medina Kedima’s cobblestones, my espadrilles were worn down and unwearable within a month. By the middle of my stay, I was wearing a down to wearing a hideous pair of Tevas at the beach.

All of this is to say that I recently began wearing my third pair of espadrilles (my sister’s), and this time, I paid close attention to their demise. Light grey and two sizes too big for me, I took them out for a lovely week in Long Island last week, and boy, did they disintegrate! Among a sea of braided brown Rainbow Sandals, my decomposing light grey espadrilles stood out like a beacon of good taste among a sea of braided sheep. The old lady in her thong-strap sandals? Please. The teenage boy in his medium-wash Sperry’s? He’s got nothing on me. Climbing up the pier steps to find my shoes after a long, hard day of lounging at the beach, I was excited to put on my espadrilles. With a hole beginning to form at my second toe and the rubber lining of the sole posing a tripping hazard as I walked, they were just as I remembered them from summer travels past.

Nostalgia aside, there is something deliciously subversive about prancing around in an item with so clearly limited a shelf-life. I originally selected my espadrilles for their apparent authenticity, their closeness to a lost world in which you had to journey to a certain country to encounter its wares. Outwardly, they might suggest I am well-traveled and European-adjacent; my espadrilles are unbranded, recognizable only for their shape rather than their brand. They have an air of mystery, and by wearing them, I do, too.

At its best, fashion is about embodying an identity; it is about translating your inner world to the outside one. A person with style can demonstrate their sensitivity to the outside world while simultaneously expressing their capacity to process societal trends with a critical eye. With the right mindset, getting dressed in the morning becomes an act of agency. You wake up in the morning and you choose to wear certain items of clothing. You choose to wear this skirt but not that hat, this shirt but not that sweater. When viewed this way, dressing each day becomes a ritual of intentionality. At its core, style allows you to assert a modicum of control over the day ahead. In an unpredictable world, that is a rare thing indeed.

Selecting a pair of crappy espadrilles as my choice of shoes for the day is an exercise in irony and autonomy. Both what I want to say in wearing the shoes and the story others assign to me because of my shoes illustrate the unique spirit of agency fashion affords the wearer. At the same time, my espadrilles serve as a depressing reminder of the consumerist demands fashion makes on people, negating that self-same agency. The mass production of fashion items has created a whole host of harms whose demerits have been expounded upon ad nauseam. The ecological and social impacts of the fashion industry are brutal and well-known. That is undeniable, but the irony still stands: I assert my independence in choosing which shoes to wear and ciphering other people’s outfits at the same time that I undermine it by supporting a system I cannot morally defend.

From the WASP-y librarian who uses his car to run over his loafers to break them in to the tennis aficionado who tells me tennis balls are only good for three sets, our consumer culture operates on the very cusp of irony. Fashion, at least, stays true to itself; just like my espadrilles, it has never denied the centrality of consumption to its existence. The thing about fashion is that it is all about consumption, but it is also conspicuously about consumption. The key to engaging with fashion equitably, as is often the case, lies in exerting your own agency.