COLOURBLINDNESS
I've been looking for a new pair of shoes. For more than a year.
I decided I wanted to find some running shoes because none of the footwear I have is great for all the city walking I do.
I imagined I could find something I liked online with little effort, and even design my own on various sites, but wanted instead to support one of the remaining bricks-and-mortar businesses. So I started walking into shoe stores when I came across them. In Calgary, Vancouver, and Victoria I went into Running Room, SoftMoc, New Balance, Nomad Footwear, Field's Shoes, Valhalla, Frontrunners, Heart and Sole, John Fluvog, MEC, The Bay, Aldo, Sport Chek, Winners, and more. It seems almost all men's shoes, of any type and brand, are black. Those that aren't black tend to be royal blue or navy. Less common are cool grey and forest green. And more rare still are red, orange, or yellow shoes (which always come in an ugly hue, and instead of having any style – they're usually much more ugly than others – they rely upon their colour to set them apart.) This was so surprising a finding that I started taking pictures of wall after wall of black shoes. So I can report that, between the places with the greatest numbers of shoes, the Running Room had the widest variety, with 36 pairs of black shoes, 10 blue, 8 grey, 2 green, and 1 fluorescent yellow. It was interesting to note that, even within the wide variety of brands and models available, there’s little difference among these black shoes. They're all have nearly identical shape, style, materials, and even shade of black, and all with a titanium white sole. In this way every shop has essentially the Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Converse, Asics, and New Balance versions of the same shoe. It's wild.
As a result, it looks to me like we have an explicit, institutionalized dress code. Why is that? What explains this convergence? Is this a market driven phenomena, in which a producer or seller deviating from a certain range of options has little chance of moving product? I don't believe this kind of fixation or fad actually exists. Sure, “fashion” is a thing and seasonal trends come and go but that’s really an internal industry thing and not so much a real-world situation. For example, if you see someone in bell bottoms and a flowing afro nobody looks on and thinks, “Ew! That’s, like, sooo Spring ‘67! Get with the times, lady!’” Moreover, the vast majority of the population lacks the interest, tolerance, income, or closet space sufficient to keep pace with the biweekly transmutations of contemporary fast fashion. And our fashion is so fast in the 21st century the moment something is no longer trending it’s ripe for parody and then almost immediately thereafter a revisit and revival. And, too, with every style there are seasonal variants, annual reboots, and guest designer remixes. Right? (I mean, Michael Jordan has been retired from professional sport for ages and yet he's had his own named Nike hitting sneaker showrooms every few months since 1985. In fact, they just had their 33rd model release, some of which have been retro-ed and released in alternate colour combos ten or more times.)
But this isn't just a footwear or fashion thing. This lack of variation also happens in the world of automobiles. Doesn't it? Like with the Dodge Durango, GMC Envoy, Chevy TrailBlazer, Chrysler Aspen, and Saab 9-7X. Here we have quintuplets born of five different parent companies. Not only do they just look very similar but they also have nearly identical features and performance and come in the same colours, all at a similar price-point. If you go looking there's an endless series of similar examples from every other car company on the planet, from Mazda and Audi, Kia and BMW, Ford and Toyota, Porsche and Hyundai, Aston Martin and Volkswagen.
So with all this evidence, why don't I believe it's market driven? Well, I don't think that's how the world works. I think people consume what's available for consumption. This is what the internet taught us.
Corporate television and radio, for example, with ages of consumer data and hundreds of millions on the line, were convinced the general public neither wanted nor had the attention span for longer form content here in the digital epoch. And when they transitioned to the internet they brought this wisdom with them. The marketers and production teams simply knew you couldn't win a large audience if you offered dense content or anything lasting more than a few minutes, tops.
Except that those following this model have largely collapsed and those speaking to the largest audiences, and now shaping culture, have made careers or renewed older ones with half hour-long, or even three or four hour-long shows or podcasts. From Radiolab to Waking Up, Hardcore History to Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, millions upon millions of subscribers have shown they want to spend hours not just being entertained but also getting deeply into messy ideas that may even challenge their basic assumptions.
Jerry Seinfeld, who knows something about network television, likes to talk about how he wanted to start Comedians In Cars and first spoke with all the experts in the business about how to do it. He was told unanimously that episodes could not be longer than a couple of minutes if he wanted subscribers. But that's not what he wanted to do and so put out twenty minute shows anyway. After nine successful seasons he just sold his Emmy-nominated show to Netflix for a hundred million dollars.
To get even more specific, the television network with the highest nightly news viewership in America is NBC, at roughly 1.5 million. It offers short spurts of superficial content incessantly punctuated by abrading car, beer, and shampoo commercials – as is the norm. Many podcasts and Youtube channels, such as This American Life, The Joe Rogan Experience, or Revisionist History, achieve as many or more views each episode – and can go uninterrupted for 4.5 hours and include long academic explanations of topics as varied as nutrition and exercise, fungi evolution and ethnopharmacology, kickboxing and golf, physics and cosmology, stand-up comedy and acting, journalism and politics, ancient history and the technology of war – or all of the above in just one show.
So folks aren’t as into trends, or nearly as stupid and disinterested, as marketers would hope and, seemingly, demand. Instead, I think most people consume what is on offer, and more of what’s easily available than what's hard to come by. Obviously. Rather than people being unwilling to try something new or less conventional, businesses have every incentive to mimic proven models than expend resources testing the water, running up stream, or breaking moulds.
Me, I just gave up looking for shoes. I broke down and bought them online.
