FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN — There is a famous photo of Kate Moss that marks a before and after for her career, and for Birkenstocks. She portrays her as a sixteen-year-old, still unknown, on the English beach of Camber Sands with a cigarette in her hand, without make-up, a sweater over her bikini and Birkenstocks on her feet. She appeared on the cover of The Face, it was her shoot that consecrated her and invented a look that became common in the nineties. Never before had anyone associated Birkenstocks with the word fashion. Then, slowly, yes.
Birkenstock will be listed on Wall Street next week. And it will be, with the company’s capitalization having reached 9 billion and an initial offering that will bring 1.6 billion to its coffers, the third largest stock market debut of the year. Not bad for a German company that produces cork soles, except that Birkenstock has been in LVMH’s orbit since 2021. The French with the financial company L Catterton control the majority, and Bernard Arnault’s son, Alexandre (after Musk, the Arnaults are still the richest dynasty in the world) will join the board of directors. Proof of how much the world of luxury has expanded with globalization and social media, so much so that LMVH is among the very few European companies able to compete with the American giants.
Birkenstocks are now sold in 25 million pairs a year. It’s nostalgic to think of the Germans who descended on the Romagna Riviera with sandals and white socks on their feet, looked at askance if not a little pitied. Or even think back to the fact that only ten years ago, on the ferries to Greece, when they were already starting to spread everywhere, we swore that we would never wear that rough shoe, except to put it today – for its comfort – as an inseparable companion in the suitcase and use it everywhere in the city .
Yet even the Birkenstock, if only because it was born in 1774 in Langen-Bergheim, has had several lives. For a long time its factories made closed shoes and orthopedic products. The first sandal was created only in 1962, and shortly afterwards in the seventies the Arizona model arrived, still the best-selling one. However, it is the passage to America that gives the “German sandal” an identity status. The first to bring the Arizona to California was Margot Fraser, a German transplanted to San Francisco who, during a holiday in her homeland, suffering from blisters and sore feet, was advised by a doctor to try Birkenstocks. Once healed and conquered, she purchased the license to sell them in America, but the return home was a fiasco. “They are the ugliest thing we have ever seen, no one will ever wear them”, the shopkeepers replied to her and in fact she found no distributors. So he placed them in the health food shops of the Bay Area, which began to attract students and hippies: and from there they spread to San Francisco — along with the desire for freedom of a generation of pacifists, feminists and LGBT activists who rejected bras and heels, in favor of skirt and sandals. The counterculture had found a symbol.
But, photos of Kate Moss aside, it is only in the last ten years that the phenomenon has truly exploded. And if high fashion is a damned serious business, as Miranda-Meryl Streep teaches in The Devil Wears Prada to the naive intern Anne Hathaway (who takes herself too seriously to care about how she dresses, but that was over ten years ago, before social media), the definitive explosion is attributed to the genius of Phoebe Philo. In 2013, at CÃ © line, she shows the fur-lined Birkenstocks on the catwalk with her intellectual-chic snobbery. And she is immediately mania. The rest are numbers. These slippers are so customary, so universal that Andy McDowell wears a pair of fluorescent ones under his gala dress when he collects his first Oscar in 2021.
Of course, it must be said that Birkenstock is a complex company. It has 800 lines of footwear, orthopedic products, sleep lines: if it is worth 9 billion it is because it intercepted the health trend long before others, has used ecological adhesives since the 1980s, and relies on collaborations. Today it is, together with beer, perhaps the most recognizable German icon. So much so that when Barbie, in the famous scene from Greta Gerwig’s film, becomes human, she comes off her toes and wears Birkenstocks.
2023-10-03 19:35:04
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