I live in hope of the great trainer revival but increasingly feel I may be waiting in vain.
It's not that I think it will never happen, just that I may be too old to enjoy it when it does finally does.
It wasn't a worry until I saw the headline "What's your trainer age?" on a website article. Sensing danger in the form of uncomfortable home truths, I should have left-clicked away from it. Instead I read on, and now I'm obsessed with age-appropriate sports footwear.
To paraphrase, the article said that if you're under 18 or over 60, you can wear any trainer you like. That's the good news. Here's the bad news: whether it's shiny black high-tops with gold laces or K-Swiss shoes, you need to think twice about trainers if you're straying into the tricky middle years. Better still, don't think about them at all. Just buy yourself a nice pair of Hush Puppies instead.
Oh dear. While the rational grown-up man inside me can see there is some merit to this argument, the irrational boy still isn't ready to start wearing brogues with jeans. And when it's man against boy in a what-shoes-to-wear fight, junior always comes out on top.
In that spirit, I have a compromise to offer anyone genuinely worried they may be too old to wear trainers: never wear a pair which is younger than you are.
For me, being in my mid-40s, that means sticking to a handful of shoes. Luckily they're all classics: the Adidas Stan Smith, for instance, which hit the shelves in 1965. Or the Chuck Taylor All Star baseball boot, first manufactured by Converse in Massachusetts in 1917. Or (my favourite) Vans' Authentic slip-on skateboard shoe, which began life in March 1966 in Anaheim, California. I entered the world three months later in Edinburgh, Scotland. It's a perfect fit.
I might manage a pair of Adidas Superstars, first introduced in 1969, although only if I lie about my age. But I don't think even my youthful demeanour and svelte physique could carry off a pair of Nike Air Jordans from 1984 (the year I left school), or the Nike Air Max of 1987 (the year I realised I was going to have to get a job). And I would look utterly ridiculous in Reebok's Pump, from 1989, a chunky high-top which you could inflate by pressing a red button (basketball star Dee Brown made a ritual of ostentatiously pumping his before shooting hoops).
So, think before you enter Shoe Locker – and if you're old enough to be on first-name terms with an osteopath, it's probably best to avoid anything your children's friends might wear or which couldn't be filed under the headings "plimsoll", "classic" or "orthopaedic". You don't want to be mutton dressed as a slam-dunking NBA star, do you? n
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