Thievery! All of us with younger siblings know what it’s like. Your favorite pair of off-brand boots from Target (or wherever), vanished, and you know who’s to blame. “They’re too small for you! It should be my turn!” they proclaim. They complain about hand-me-downs, but they stole them from you in the first place.
So there I was last June, newly bootless, driving over to Broadway Plaza to find myself some new footwear. Macy’s turned up no results. I was about to head home, when I rounded the corner and confronted the site that would alter the course of my life forever.
A wood-paneled shop, across the street from an Apple Store, beckoned. Its yellow-lettered header promised combat boots – seas of combat boots. Oxfords and Mary Janes and big, clomping footwear galore, all below the banner of comfortable footwear initially offered to 1950s British housewives. That’s right, I had entered the world of Dr. Martens, and now there was no escape.
I walked hesitantly inside, past racks of boots: black boots, brown boots, rose-embroidered boots, orange and gold kaleidoscope boots, boots emblazoned with Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” on both sides. The under-cabinet lighting suffused the air with a heavenly glow. Finally, my future style, a vibrant lavender, caught my eye.
“That’s the spring collection,” the attendant told me. “They’re on discount.”
“On discount,” apparently, was a price so mind-boggling I had to ask her to repeat it twice. That much money could basically pay for a car, or even a latte at Starbucks these days! Nevertheless, you go to the mall expecting to be swindled out of ridiculous amounts of cash. I had come prepared.
Soon, I marched back and forth at the attendant’s behest, trying on size after size to find the correct fit. After a few minutes, she frowned and asked me what socks I had on. Apparently, one does not wear ankle socks to their boot fitting. It’s simply not done.
“Honey, just come back with crew length or above for your next pair, okay?” she said as she rang me up.
My next pair? I had been the official owner of a pair of Docs for approximately 0.5 milliseconds at that point, and we were talking about next pairs? What kind of hold did these shoes have on people?
It turns out, a spectacular one. I took a walk down the street in my new boots, and drivers rolled down their windows to compliment me. When I used them as my Discord profile picture (please stop laughing), I received multiple new friend requests. But the greatest impact of my new footwear was at school.
Laypeople, sporting their mundane Air Force Jordans and Crocs, stared at me in the hallways. When I met my fellow believers, those lucky individuals, we exchanged a smile and a nod. It would be uncool to rush up to strangers and gush over their shoes, and I had Dr. Martens, so I was cool now.
Upon reflection, that modern mainstream power is incredibly ironic. As I learned at the bottom of a hypnotized internet rabbit hole later that day, the brand was founded in the 1950s and within a few decades was tied to niche subcultures and a peculiarly indie variety of coolness. The countercultural associations of these iconic boots have persisted to the present day.
High schoolers with Docs, in my experience, are assumed to possess at minimum one of the following traits: theater kid, still listens to AC/DC and Aerosmith, crochets epic scarves that they wear daily, collects enamel pins, cat owner, future liberal arts major, vaguely socialist in political alignment. That girl from middle school who wrote Google-Translated Latin slogans on all her clothing? She wore Dr. Martens. Your cool older sister who goes to UC Berkeley? She wears Dr. Martens.
Furthermore, the modern collecting frenzy applies to Docs as much as any other brand. My cashier wasn’t wrong in that shoppers do come back for more. One girl at my summer camp brought three pairs in her suitcase alone. Three. Pairs. I don’t know how she even managed to pack any clothes to go with them.
Either way, that’s good for her, but the boots are really! Dang! Expensive! Up to $200 is a lot of money, especially when you throw in the company’s proprietary leather treatments and shoe repair kits on top. Despite their famous air soles, they don’t make walking any easier (?) than any other footwear option. Mine have been impossible to “break in” in the back, so I constantly get blisters. Why, then, have I and millions of people like me stayed in the cult?
The answer is, like any cult, there’s no way out. When you purchase a pair of Dr. Martens, you’re signing an unwritten contract that will define the remainder of your life. That cool person feeling is impossible to describe and impossible to get rid of. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I can say with 45% certainty that I made the right choice.
Keep living your plebeian Doc-free life if you want to. Or empty out your life’s savings, buy a jar of blister salve, practice your sophisticated-person face and join me on the dark side.
