If you were sentient and online back in August, you’ll remember the Charli xcx video for “Guess”, featuring Billie Eilish. The whole thing was very “MTV2 in 2007”: people making out in little booty riders, thongs galore and barely a phone in sight, etc. Then Eilish crashes the party in a giant JCB digger. Except, before you see her face, you see something else: her absolutely ginormous skate trainers, slamming down on the accelerator. The big puffy kind, with laces that stretch out for days (a pair of vintage Hawks, if you’re wondering).
It wasn’t the first, nor will it be the last time we’ll see Eilish in shoes that could have been stolen from your best friend’s older brother’s room in 2002, swiped from next to his Playstation 2. The singer simply adores a chunky skate trainer. Earlier this month, at Glamour’s 2024 Women of the Year Awards, she wore Etnies with thick red laces. She’s been pictured in an old school pair of éS Accel OGs, which I thought I’d never again glimpse outside the confines of my high school gates. And let us not forget last year’s Barbie premiere, for which she wore a pair of Erl skate trainers so chunky and foamy it looked as though they had swallowed all the other skate trainers to become the ultimate boss of skate trainers.
But look, it’s not just Eilish spearheading the return of the chunky skate shoe (although these brands should pay her a dividend). The style has been threatening a full return for years now. Lanvin debuted a pair of ultra-chunky, lace-heavy skate shoes as part of Bruno Sialelli’s autumn/winter 2020 collection, and we saw Louis Vuitton’s own take on the throwback shoe in its autumn/winter 2022 menswear show (now going for £1,910 a pop). In 2022, Adidas released its Adidas Campus 00s, which, though not technically a skate shoe, sure does look like one (incorporating the classic wide silhouette and gummy sole). Now, on TikTok, the term “Adidas Campus” has amassed a staggering 173.8 million posts, such is the shoe’s popularity among young people. Even Zara has started selling its own gargantuan skate trainers, with frightening rope laces, so you know we’re really in deep. (Alexa, play Sum 41 “In Too Deep”.)
The return of the puffy skate trainer should come as no surprise. Y2K styles are now so ubiquitous that, if you were to go to any kind of Gen Z-populated event, or even just look outside, you could feasibly think that it was the 2000s (if it wasn’t for all the iPhone 16s). Even coin belts are making a return. And puffball skirts. This past summer was defined by big baggy jorts that were so low they could almost be ankle grazers. So it was only ever a matter of time before the skate trainer kickflipped its way back to the fore. It’s also worth pointing out here that, after being introduced to the Olympics in 2020, skateboarding dominated this year’s Paris Games, so we’ve seen the sport gradually entering the mainstream psyche again for the first time since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
It’s all fun and games of course, and there is something almost satisfying about the sheer chunkiness of this throwback footwear. I can still remember my first pair of Adio Bams, the perfectly rounded shape of them. But can we agree to just leave it at that? And, please, let’s not bring back the Avril Lavigne-style arm sock.
