oasis | carlosartorial

The whole trainers thing has surely been done to death now, yet it doesn’t stop hundreds of bobble hat-clad, singing section types lining up outside Oi Polloi every 3 months to greet each dubious reissue of a so-called ‘classic’ pair of Adidas. Punters start queuing at 10pm the night before, get their picture snapped waving them above their heads for the MEN live blog and then rush home and stick them on eBay for £300 a pair. In truth, that was me to a certain extent a few years ago until I realised it was a) sad as fuck and b) at 40 I was too old to be wearing trainers.

I’d got to the stage where I was more bothered about owning certain trainers then actually wearing them… which is absolutely mental of course. That and the fact that Adidas became completely ubiquitous in the same way Stone Island did a few years previously. They became part of the uniform for clueless bellends who fancy themselves as football hooligans and who listen to Kasabian and Oasis. It’s not a good look. Nobody in their right mind wants to be wearing what fat lads from Doncaster wear, basically.

Anyway, I’m losing my thread here as this is supposed to be a book review. Golden Kicks – The Shoes That Changed Sport by Jason Coles (Bloomsbury, £16.99) is aimed squarely at the footwear fetishist demographic, and very nice it is too. It comes in hardback, coffee table format and contains lots of nice pictures and a couple of hundred words of historical perspective on all the designs featured. The stories behind each shoe are revealed via insights from both the people who made them and the athletes who wore them.

A nice book then, that would make a good Christmas present for any trainer obsessive in your life. Oh and please note the use of ‘trainers’, ie they aren’t ‘sneakers’ and they certainly aren’t ‘kicks’.