As a lover of clothes, I’ve fallen more than once for the ugly shoe trend. And I don’t mean the styling trick of pairing Doc Martens with a frothy Communion dress. I mean a different kind of trend, where I think a shoe is hideous on sight and then, through repetition or indoctrination, it becomes desirable.

It happened in my 20s with Isabel Marant’s basket sneakers, a foamy block of a shoe with a hidden wedge. More recently it’s Margiela’s Tabi boot, a literal cameltoe with a split between the hallux and the rest of the foot “for balance”. They’ve always reminded me, painfully, of the tapirs in Dublin Zoo. But they’re having a moment, and repeat exposure has seen me whispering nonsense words like “elevated” and “fashion-forward” into my phone late at night.

I thought of my love of ugly shoes while reading a recent piece in the New York Times. The author argues that fashion trends were once the product of creative design houses. As with Miranda Priestly’s infamous Cerulean Blue Sweater speech, taste was top-down, trickling from couture to ready-to-wear into the sad clearance bins of the hoi polloi. Today, the author argues, trends are more likely to come via AI prediction and a factory in Guangzhou. Fashion is the latest casualty of algorithmic slop. Where taste was once shaped by fashion houses, in other words, it’s now an exercise in data analytics.

Thinking of all the ugly shoes I’ve loved before, despite my own best intentions, I’m not sure it’s quite so clear-cut. Wasn’t........

© The Irish Times