Rounded, cushioned and with a thick strap, foam sliders have been a familiar sight on feet this summer. While they are available for £30 from Adidas or £3.49 on the online marketplace Temu, a high-fashion version is now also on offer. The Ama sliders, in a choice of black, red or white, were launched by the American fashion brand The Row this week. They cost £600.
Laura Reilly, the writer of the influential fashion newsletter Magasin, called them “The Row’s latest rage bait”, using the name for posts online designed to provoke anger, and go viral in the process.
Fashion’s version of rage bait seems to be luxurious versions of everyday things. It remains unclear whether the creators of these items are deliberately provoking a reaction, but the prices certainly drive some consumers into a fury.
The Ama follows The Row’s other recent item in this tradition: the Dune sandal, otherwise known as flip-flops with a red sole, which cost £670 (they also come with a black sole, as worn by the actor Jonathan Bailey at an event to promote Jurassic World). But the brand is not alone. Items that have prompted similar outrage include a Loewe white vest for £325 and the Italian brand Golden Goose’s “dirty trainers”, which cost £435. Balenciaga, during the decade that Demna has been the creative director, has provided copious items here, from £720 Crocs, to a towel “skirt” that cost £695 and a take on the Ikea Frakta bag for £1,365.
Dal Chodha, the pathway leader of Central Saint Martins’ fashion communication course, is familiar with the genre. “This one in particular is brilliant because it’s so well positioned for us to take offence, in the most exquisite way,” he says. “There’s an awful lot of [questions] that come out of looking at that shoe. The first is the one that most people ask themselves when they look at [a] work of art or any piece of luxury fashion: ‘Why does that cost that much?’”
Taking something ordinary and putting it into a different context has a tradition in the visual arts, one that Balenciaga’s Demna is definitely influenced by. See Marcel Duchamp’s urinal in 1917, Jeff Koons’s 1980 vacuum cleaner and Martin Creed’s light switch from 2000, all items that have prompted public rage.
But if art remains elitist due to the fact that most people can’t buy it, everyone wears clothes, so consumers feel more invested when everyday items are sold for higher prices. This has long created a tension; Daniel Rodgers, the fashion news editor at Vogue, describes it as “an inverse form of snobbery from people who have always been cynical of luxury fashion anyway” – but it is exacerbated by online discourse. “Everyone’s voice is amplified so now we’re hearing more from the people that don’t get [items such as the Ama],” says Chodha.
The wider news cycle is also a factor. “I’m interested in who’s defending that shoe, and is it defendable,” says Chodha. “I would’ve been that person a while ago but now with all of the wars happening around the world and all of the economic struggles that we’re all going through, I just think this is a bit insane.”
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Rodgers says the flatness of online exacerbates the reaction. “Fashion is mediated mostly now through onscreen images,” he says. “In the case of the Balenciaga Ikea shopping bag, you look at a picture of it on the screen and you think ‘What? I can pick that up from Ikea for 75p!’, but what you don’t see on screen is actually leather and it is actually made like a luxury item.”
At The Row’s store in London’s Mayfair on Thursday afternoon, the Ama are not yet on display but a sales associate says they arrived the previous day and have already sold out in the most popular sizes. If the price might raise a lot of eyebrows, it is at home among items such as a simple white T-shirt that costs £510 or a striped silk shirt at £1,530. Like this shirt, which feels memorably soft and luxurious, the quality of the Ama is noticeable: it is lighter and more streamlined than the average foam slider. Although perhaps not enough to justify a price 1,900% above the Adidas design. In this environment, however, this is not the point. “For an average shopper at The Row that is not expensive,” says Rodgers.