2023-09-13 17:31:30
– After the Barbie hype comes the billion-dollar deal
The cork and leather definition of good Germanness is enrapturing the financial world – thanks in part to “Barbie”. An appreciation of the Birkenstock shoe.
Tanja Rest
Barbie finally had a choice: “You can return to your old life or learn the truth regarding the universe,” said an oracle and held two pairs of shoes in front of the blonde, blue-eyed woman’s powdered nose. Pink high heels on the right, flesh-colored Birkenstocks on the left. Footbed, cork sole, two straps, the classic “Arizona”.
In the company headquarters in Linz on the Rhine, between Koblenz and Cologne, they will have opened a bottle of champagne at this point: The in-house ancient slip on the side of truth, purification and transcendental knowledge – how cool can things actually be so shortly before the stock market launch ?! It’s supposed to take place in New York soon.
Well, of course Barbie took the heels first, but she went to the gynecologist in the very last scene in Arizona from Germany, which completed her incarnation. From fakeness to wokeness, how wonderful!
The flesh-colored Barbie Birkenstocks then sold so often that some of them were sold out in orthopedic stores in western capitals, and their market value almost doubled to an estimated eight to ten billion francs; At the end of the week we will know exactly where it will settle.
Square, practical, ugly – and definitely not sexy
But today this is already a German fairy tale. The car industry may be weakening, the national football team is in the dust, the last place at the ESC is firmly booked for Germany for all time – but the 90-franc health insurance of a company founded in Langen-Bergheim in 1774 by the master shoemaker Johann Adam Birkenstock is electrifying people these days international financial world.
It is, let’s be self-confident here, not an apologetic oh-ha-even though it’s German product, but rather the cork and leather definition of good Germanness in the world. Earthbound. High-quality. Durable. Democratic (if someone claims that we have to “take back democracy”, registered Birkenstocks are recommended as projectiles). Unpretentious, of course. Definitely not sexy. Square, practical, rather ugly, but with an interesting impulse of desire that sparkles into the spheres of luxury.
Marc Jacobs wanted to change the sacred cork sole, which would have amounted to blasphemy.
In 2012 you sat at the Celine show in Paris, first looking at the catwalk and then at the faces. There was this rare, collectively delighted desire to have something, which was obviously sparked by the Birkenstocks, which were upholstered here with colorful plush (they are still called “Furkenstocks” today). This was followed by interpretations by Rick Owens, Isabel Marant, Givenchy, Steve Madden; Only Marc Jacobs didn’t get the okay from Linz am Rhein in the end because he wanted to change the holy cork sole, which would have amounted to blasphemy, which is why Yohji Yamamoto then struck.
Birkenstock, Germany, equipped the hippies in San Francisco, the young Greens in the German Bundestag, later Steve Jobs, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Leonardo DiCaprio and today everyone who makes a statement out of German love for (toe) freedom – everyone Despite hostility.
Nothing respects fashion more than those who despise it.
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