Last year, an unexpected and opulent shoe emerged as a certified hit among today’s most adventurous dressers. It was a classic-looking leather clog…adorned with a giant gold chain, and it came from the mind of British designer JW Anderson. The world wasn’t used to seeing such shiny and oversized bling on a clog, but the design clearly struck a chord. Everyone from iconic designer and immaculate dresser Marc Jacobs to the wildly stylish writer and taste god Jeremy O. Harris donned a pair. (As did pop star Dua Lipa, further cementing the crossover between men’s and women’s fashion.)
The appeal and timing of this particular wild-style shoe seemed to be in sync from the start. It launched in the pandemic year, a time when even fashion’s most eclectic dressers found themselves stuck at home in cozy loungewear. The Chain Loafer was the rare high-style item that provided comfort and eccentricity in spades—it was essentially a house shoe worthy of stunting on the runway. The duality was enough for many fashion heads to flock to the shoe. But could such a decadent and outlandish shoe really have longevity past a year when everyone was bored stiff? Apparently so.
In an Instagram post this week, Anderson teased some new iterations of the shoe, showing that the style isn’t going anywhere. As a matter of fact, the Chain Loafer is not merely continuing on, but it is getting a slew of head-turning upgrades.
For now, you can head to Anderson’s site and grab the shoe in a mess of colors and fabrications: yellow suede, say, or gray or blue monochrome. These aren’t the simple black options that launched last year.
But that, as they say, is not all. It seems that for Anderson’s spring-summer 2022 collection—the one that’ll debut soon—the style will be shown in a trio of new options. First, one version swaps the classic black leather for a much louder shade of neon slime-green. (The gold chain remains untouched.) Another pair sees the bulbous chain produced in translucent acrylic plastic and coupled with leather in a shade of screen-melting orange.
Lastly, and perhaps the most mellow iteration, the loafer is given a tonal, all-white colorway (white leather shoe, white chain motif), about as minimal as such a lavish shoe can get. In some ways, it feels pretty bold to proclaim that a shoe so eye-catching will still find a feverish audience a full calendar year from now. But on the other hand, the shoe remains wildly popular amongst a specific subset of fashion’s circle. How could it not continue to fly off the shelves?
The shelf life of a loud, buzzy shoe can be fickle and often impossible to predict. Look at the Balenciaga Triple S. Once the crown jewel of outlandish men’s footwear, it had about a red-hot year as a shoe can before it fizzled out. (Oddly enough, this isn’t even the first time a chain-themed shoe has become a hit among the fashion-inclined with deep pockets. Sneakerheads will remember the Salehe Bembury-designed Versace “Chain Reaction” sneaker from a few years back.)
But where designer sneakers have mostly just swapped colors in an attempt at longevity, JW Anderson is reimagining what the future of the Chain Loafer looks like. Each of these new colorways feels like a new shoe entirely. The shoe feels a little too over-the-top to be entered in the canon of timeless loafers, alongside Gucci’s iconic Horsebit Loafer or the less pricey but equally beloved Bass Weejun. Only time will tell if the market will be chomping at the bit for blinged-out $640 loafers a year from now—but if fashion’s embrace of the original offers any hints, it’s that these might not be fading into the background anytime soon.
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