A mere 1,800 years or so after the fall of the Roman Empire gladiator sandals for men seem to be making a comeback. I didn’t really believe it at first. When Liberty first told me two months ago that elaborately strappy flat-soled summer sandals were emerging as a discernible men’s micro-trend in 2010, it seemed about as likely as Italy getting knocked out of the World Cup at the group stage. Yet Ed Burstell, Liberty’s buying director, was armed with an attention-grabbing arsenal of evidence to support his hypothesis.
He said: “We’re selling both the extreme full-on gladiator — above the ankle — as well as more commercial versions with modified strappings in dark and luggage browns. Some of the best are by McQueen, Raf, Geiger and Officine.”
Why, though? And why now? Gladiator sandals may have been the footwear that marched back and forth across the world’s greatest empire, but that was back when togas were butch, poetry didn’t need state funding, slavery was de rigueur and rotting anchovy oil was a chichi condiment. Times have changed.
I doubted Burstell. But then, last week in Milan, he was revealed to me as menswear’s Cassandra. For there, on Christopher Bailey’s Burberry catwalk, strode gladiator sandal after gladiator sandal, to the rousing accompaniment of You’ll Never Walk Alone.
Burberry’s ready-to-wear flagship line is called Prorsum, but it is often rooted in backstories — most consistently its trenchcoat heritage. This time round Bailey majored on everything from suede trenches (Midnight Cowboy) to studded leather jackets (Easy Rider, Sid and Nancy), via classic trenches with stud-detailing aplently (the soundclash climax of this collection). Most of the looks featured this new Burberry gladiator, which has a satisfyingly chunky, Birkenstockian sole but were still, at the end of the day, pretty much the same piece of footwear that even Russell Crowe struggled to carry off.
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So where on earth did the gladiator come from? “Cassandra” Burstell knows, and this time I’m not doubting his word: “For a few years now it has been becoming more and more apparent that the men’s market mimics ladies by a season. Skinny jeans, the man bag, shrunken leather jackets, bed hair and (m)anorexia and now the gladiator.” Aaaah. Now that Burstell says it, it all makes sense. That’s why the harem trouser has crossed the Rubicon from womenswear (where it was vile enough), to menswear. That’s why male models are getting skinnier, and the most successful female models of the moment have a whiff of androgyny about them. After years of compatibility issues, designers are in-building points of reference between their collections for men and women. And that’s why I bet that, come September in London, the Burberry spring/summer 2011 womenswer collection will feature motifs common with the menswear collection just passed — most likely the studded trench. For this is exactly what happened last season: at January’s menswear shows (for autumn/winter 2010), the catwalks were flocked with shearling jackets — perhaps most notably Burberry’s inside/out Biggles jackets.
A month later, at the womenswear shows for the same season, there was shearling again as one of the trends for this winter.
So although Burstell has noticed trends such as harem trousers and gladiator sandals emanating from womenswear and insinuating themselves into menswear, there’s as much anecdotal evidence that everything from boyfriend jeans to Céline and Stella’s new pared-down womenswear aesthetic is partially culled from menswear. Fashion, so often a way of delineating the differences between genders, is currently engaged in blurring them. Whether they’re doing this to save on marketing and manufacturing budgets or because they have divined a new sartorial egalitarianism between the genders is almost as difficult to answer as the question of how one deals with gladiator-sandal tanlines.