Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Function or Style
Now in my fifth week of physical therapy for injuries sustained by the defective and poorly-designed top-of-the-line sandals I had bought myself for my birthday, I'm finally beginning to get a full night's sleep--one where I don't wake up with aching feet or throbbing pain in my knees. And to think the whole reason behind spending $75 for Teva's was to protect my good health.
But aside from my having to drop five hundred bucks on repairing my legs, or suffering through a couple months of pain and discomfort, I've been wondering just what Teva was thinking when they redesigned a perfectly suitable sandal--a model that I'd purchased several times over the last seven years--into an instrument of torture. Sure they look more sporty, in a kind of extreme way--much like SUVs--but why ruin a reputation built on function for style?
By chance I recently came across an article on shoes in the Feb. 14 & 21 issue of New Yorker magazine titled Sole Survivor, which asks the question, "Were Stone Age shoes more comfortable?" In this fascinating story about footwear, we meet Petr Hlavacek, a professor of shoe technology at Tomas Bata University, who concludes that, "The number of incorrect and dangerous shoes is high...higher and higher."
Noting that Czech shoes were once the best-made in Europe, he observes that the world has been "flooded with cheap, poorly-designed Asian shoes, and the effects are showing." In the Czech Republic, the number of complications from bad footwear is three times higher than twenty years ago. According to Hlavacek, the majority of today's footwear is less ergonomic than Roman sandals of two thousand years ago.
Hlavacek's father was a shoemaker, and his home town was renowned for making quality shoes, fifty-eight million pairs a year at it's peak. Recently he tried out a pair of custom-made sandals concluding, "First ten minutes, no problem. One hour, no problem. But after four hours...,"which reminded me of the comment made by the salesman who initially persuaded me that the new design would improve my posture. When I phoned him about my painful experience a day later, he told me to keep at it--that they were realigning my body, and that I would soon be fine. A week later I hobbled into the physical medicine center with excruciating knots in my insteps, calves, knees and hamstrings.
But aside from my having to drop five hundred bucks on repairing my legs, or suffering through a couple months of pain and discomfort, I've been wondering just what Teva was thinking when they redesigned a perfectly suitable sandal--a model that I'd purchased several times over the last seven years--into an instrument of torture. Sure they look more sporty, in a kind of extreme way--much like SUVs--but why ruin a reputation built on function for style?
By chance I recently came across an article on shoes in the Feb. 14 & 21 issue of New Yorker magazine titled Sole Survivor, which asks the question, "Were Stone Age shoes more comfortable?" In this fascinating story about footwear, we meet Petr Hlavacek, a professor of shoe technology at Tomas Bata University, who concludes that, "The number of incorrect and dangerous shoes is high...higher and higher."
Noting that Czech shoes were once the best-made in Europe, he observes that the world has been "flooded with cheap, poorly-designed Asian shoes, and the effects are showing." In the Czech Republic, the number of complications from bad footwear is three times higher than twenty years ago. According to Hlavacek, the majority of today's footwear is less ergonomic than Roman sandals of two thousand years ago.
Hlavacek's father was a shoemaker, and his home town was renowned for making quality shoes, fifty-eight million pairs a year at it's peak. Recently he tried out a pair of custom-made sandals concluding, "First ten minutes, no problem. One hour, no problem. But after four hours...,"which reminded me of the comment made by the salesman who initially persuaded me that the new design would improve my posture. When I phoned him about my painful experience a day later, he told me to keep at it--that they were realigning my body, and that I would soon be fine. A week later I hobbled into the physical medicine center with excruciating knots in my insteps, calves, knees and hamstrings.
