I need to try slip in and slip on shoes at the store. See which style I like.
I remember something called “Keds” from my childhood, which I think were canvas sneakers but don’t remember if they were slip on or regular lace up sneakers.
Deck shoes or boat shoes, and I never saw anyone wear them in California. I only knew what they were from L.L.Bean catalogs and fashion magazines, neither of which I encountered much. I saw them in person when I went to college Back East.
Lace up versions were sneakers. Children wore them. They weren’t an adult shoe. In my childhood there were strong distinctions between grown-up clothes and child clothes. Running as a popular sport had not been invented, nor did adult women engage in athletic behavior that I ever knew about.
Depends on when your childhood was - in the seventies and 80s , there was a Keds sneaker style we called “skippies”, like these. . They came in leather and canvas , and were also made by other companies. There were also pro-keds, which were different. At some point ( don’t know when )Keds started making slip-ons
I remember Keds as rather generic lace-up sneakers.
I grew up in California, and I remember people wearing deck shoes/Topsiders. But I lived near the beach, so maybe that’s why.
I miss calling “flip flops” thongs. The underwear lobby has coopted.
Exactly
I grew up calling them zories.
I just remembered the “cool” guys in grade school clicking down the hall with cleats on the bottoms of their slip ons.
The night I met my now gf, we were both wearing Chuck Taylor high tops, hers red and mine black. We were the only two in the packed bar wearing them.
We called them flip flops or thongs. A friend’s mom called them dories and I thought she was nuts.
We called them zories too, it’s a Japanese term iirc.
Yeah. It’s Japanese.
Jeff Spicoli wears nothing but these in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
The earliest ones I remember seeing had the checkerboard pattern. Vans started in CA in the 1960s, so I saw them in movies long before they made it to stores in rural KY. They were a staple of skateboard/surf culture when Boomers were young.
I love Chuck’s.
Slip-on-sneakers in the old days… Size too big.
Boat shoes
Exactly. Matched with a LaCosta shirt and a sweater tied around your waist.
No, topsiders were different, and indeed were called topsiders. I was there for those becoming popular – at least, for when they did in my area.
This must be highly regional. My father wore deck shoes at the beach, on boats, and sometimes for yardwork and such. Many other adults wore them too.
ETA: I missed that this was about the lace up version. I think my father wore Jack Purcell’s for lace up canvas shoes, but he didn’t wear them nearly as much as the blue canvas slip-on deck shoes.