I’m on the Champs Elysées somewhere and oh my god, my heel hurts. I’ve stopped being able to walk like a normal person; instead I sort of shuffle along, lifting my left heel by scrunching my toes up and putting all my weight on the front of the foot to avoid rubbing what must surely by now be raw flesh bonding with my sock. I’m afraid to take my boots off to look.

A Nike swoosh rises like a mirage on the other side of the road and I almost yelp with joy: I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see a big box store. I cross the street and hobble to the sneaker section which is huge and utterly confusing. There’s a boy folding T-shirts nearby, young enough to be my son in another life; with pimples on his chin and in head-to-toe Nike. Of course. I ask for help.

Excuse-moi, est-ce vous pouvez m’aider? J’ai besoin de baskets…  Quelque chose de simple?

I must have been a teenager the last time I wore a pair of trainers outside the gym: navy blue Adidas Gazelles with white stripes, the same kind Damon Albarn wore. As a grown-up, all that conspicuous branding seems puerile, mug-ish, too many logos an anathema to good taste. Though like any self-respecting fashion scholar I’ve read enough Bourdieu to know that ‘good taste’ is a cultural construct. Plus, they are comfortable.

I’ve got a minor tower of trainers in front of me now, size 40 in every imaginable colourway. I try a few on, but lose heart pretty fast. All I want is something cheap, unobtrusive. Something to wear while I limp home. I spot a pair that fit the bill: pretty plain, €85, black with white laces and a swoosh. Well four swooshes actually, swooshes all over, white on black, there’s no way you’ll miss them. They’ll do.

When I get home, I put my new shoes at the back of my wardrobe and proceed to forget all about them. They stay there for quite a while in fact, while other shoes, other concerns, life, takes over. And then one day I’m looking for something I don’t remember what, and instead stumble on those Nikes again. They still look – and smell – immaculate, box fresh: a pair of comfortable everyday, nothing special trainers, one of millions made in a factory far away.

I wear them that day to the gym, because why not, and then continue wearing them: to the supermarket, running errands, to see friends and colleagues, on travels, to fashion shows. And just as they wheedled their way into my wardrobe, they slip into my everyday life – and when I start travelling every month from my home in Paris to Homerton Hospital in London, I wear them too.

* * *

I was talking to my friend Abdul recently; he’s a self-confessed sneakerhead with thousands of shoes in his collection, so many shoes that they’ve taken over every wardrobe in his house, the bookshelves in his front room, his entire office and his mom’s garage.  He told me about falling in love with sneakers as a boy in Sierra Leone. As a kid he played soccer and ran track so they were useful, but then one day he got to see a bootleg VHS tape someone had brought back from America: Police Academy 4. There’s a scene in the movie where a pack of kids skateboard through a mall, then end up being chased by the cops – and every one of them is wearing Air Jordan 1’s. Young Abdul was mesmerised.

What we wear can so easily become a stand-in for yearnings, aspirations, nostalgia. Because clothes always reflect our histories; they can be powerful and transformative, mythical and magical, and full of both symbolic and immaterial value. In my work as a fashion researcher and writer I often return to how full of mystery our relationship to clothes can be, think of a ‘lucky shirt,’ or a piece of jewellery that seems charmed, or an object so connected to aspirations or fortune that it transforms into a sort of talisman, a fetish.

I think of Abdul and his friends nerding out, swapping tips on message boards or WhatsApp threads about where to get the latest iteration of the Air Force 1 or the Adidas Superstar, or the Chuck Taylor, and about how the humble sneaker has become something to stay awake all night for, camp outside a store for, obsess about, fetishise, go bankrupt for. There’s a lovely scene in the movie ‘Just for Kicks’ – a documentary that locates the rise of sneaker culture in the influence of hip hop in New York in the 1970s and 80s: B-Boys, graffiti artists and MCs appropriating shoes worn by basketball players because they were the most comfortable to dance in, stay up all night in, run from the cops in. And because these kids had no money but of course still had to look fly, they cared for their sneakers, they made them last. How? Well by cleaning them, with a toothbrush if necessary, by filling the stripes in with a felt-tip pen, by washing and ironing their shoe laces.

* * *

I’m sure you know as well as I do, what a bad reputation fashion has. It doesn’t seem to matter how successful a phenomenon it is socially or commercially, it’s still thought of as the very apex of superficiality, frivolity, vanity. Intellectuals who write about it mostly seem to do so only in order to denounce it, or else contemplate it with a sort of wry and distanced amusement. Fashion is the part of culture we love to hate. And yet, though clothing is the perhaps most fraught entity of the material world, laden as it is with paradox and ambiguity, is there any object more closely linked with the human body and the human life cycle than the clothes that we wear? There’s a line in the fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson’s book ‘Adorned in Dreams,’ that describes the intimate relationship we have to our clothes better than anything else I’ve come across: ‘garments are objects so close to our bodies so as to articulate the soul.’

Fashion matters because of it. In getting dressed we construct the self as image, simultaneously exhibiting and concealing who we are to the world. Clothing is our armour, but it can also be a failed disguise, much easier to see through than we imagine. We use clothes as marks of our distinction and authenticity, but also as a way to connect with each other and with the past, real or imagined. By virtue of wheedling their way into our everyday lives, clothes transform into material memories that ensure the past is always carried with us into the future.

The philosopher Roland Barthes once wrote that ‘the narratives of the world are numberless.’ ‘Narrative,’ he said, ‘is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.’ The narratives we weave around ourselves through the clothes that we wear have always fascinated me. Garments tell stories, and in their subtle communication we find both language and psychology. Unwanted garments can appear dejected and doleful; it’s through use that we give these inanimate objects a soul.

* * *

That’s why my Nikes are so special to me. As I look at them, lying now at the bottom of a pile of shoes by our front door, worn-out and grubby, a pair of nondescript sneakers that sustained me for a year while I visited doctors, being prodded and poked, legs in the air and feet in stirrups, learning to inject myself until my belly and ass were both bruised and painful, messing up right at the end and having to do it all over again, hoping wishing yearning for a baby. It’s a highly intimate story, out of sight mostly, the one about becoming a mother through artificial means. Being fertile is to be productive, abundant, creative – being barren feels shameful. You need comfort, tenderness, compassion, so you look for it wherever you can: in people, in your environment, in the objects that surround you and hold you. My sneakers did their part by letting me forget that I was wearing anything at all on my feet, one less thing to worry about.

See me as I run to catch the Eurostar, wait for the number 30 bus, walk across a bleak East London housing estate to the clinic, stand on a street corner gulping down coffee from a Styrofoam cup, tap my feet in the waiting room trying to focus on the latest Kim Kardashian adventure in some oil-stained issue of Closer magazine. Notice how all the women here look down at each other’s shoes, how careful we are not to meet each other’s anxious eyes. My sneakers are a suitable companion: they just are, and they let me be too – another anonymous woman bearing the Nike swoosh. What would they say if they could talk? Maybe they would nudge the boots to my right, gently ask how they’re doing. Or help me figure out why the Mary Janes to my left seem so relaxed; what do they know that we don’t? Or perhaps they could convince the nurse’s sensible Crocs to stop for a minute, and get their no-nonsense user to instead step into my shoes for a moment. Because I’m falling over here, and I’m scared.

* * *

How many miles of endless asphalt haven’t I covered in these shoes, and in how many cities? Taking shortcuts where there are none, relying on the familiarity of certain routes and city streets, focusing on little changes – a trashcan overturned by the wind, a single glove placed respectfully on the steps of an estate, a network of chewing gum in different shades of grey on the pavement, the jitteriness of traffic on this particular day – to avoid thinking about whether life is growing in me, or not. There is a kind of voluptuous, almost perverse pleasure in forcing my thoughts where they don’t want to go.

This is the stuff that our intimate lives are made of.

I’ve thought a lot lately about these types of commonplace, ordinary objects that are part of our everyday life, the non-fashionable, mass-produced stuff that form the backbone of material culture. A pair of shoes made in Indonesia, one of millions created by anonymous hands, touched by countless others on their way to a big-box store in a tourist trap neighbourhood in my beautiful Paris. These shoes that were gentle with me when I needed relief from pain and that I’ve cared for in return, swapping laces, avoiding puddles, brushing stains away. These shoes that have moulded after my feet; bunions denting the sides, soles worn down by my particular way of walking.

You probably have something like it in your wardrobe too, a pair of shoes or a piece of clothing acquired in an almost off-hand way, without much thought and without the impulse to impress anyone, something inexpensive meant to fade into the background. How much of our lives isn’t made up of these routine purchases, worn day in, day out, memories accumulating, sticking to the fabric almost despite itself. There is so much humanity to be found here, so much of us in the accumulation of these small things. These are objects that we shape and adjust to fit the routine of our daily grind, that we wear for comfort and to ease everyday existence. Our relationship to them is mostly unconscious, though in repetitive habits intimacy is born, and tenderness too.

* * *

And so, one winter morning in early March I wake up. It’s dark outside, so dark. I look at my phone; it’s 4am, and something feels off. My baby girl is moving around, she’s restless. A little elbow pokes at me from inside, or maybe a tiny foot. I get up to go to the bathroom, and oh my god I feel it – wet trickles down my leg. Just a little, and then a bit more. It’s my water, it’s broken; she’s coming she’s coming. What am I supposed to do now, I can’t think straight. There are no contractions yet, I can’t feel anything is that okay? I wake David up, we google. I call the hospital. It’s okay it’s okay. Everything is going to be just fine. The nurse on the line reassures me, ‘Your contractions will start any minute now,’ she tells me. ‘Come to the hospital as soon as you can.’ I’m strangely calm now, though my adrenaline is pumping. I take a warm shower, pack my hospital bag with books, toothpaste, fresh underwear, my phone charger. We have some leftover stale croissants for breakfast, and coffee. Lots of coffee. I get dressed, in soft pants and my warmest jumper. My big military coat, and a woolly hat. David helps me put my socks and shoes on. My feet are swollen so the only shoes that fit now are my sneakers. I’ve been wearing them every day; they’re just by the door.

It’s 5h30am now and time to go. I move laboriously, deliberately, down the stairs and into the street. I lean on David. My belly is huge and so heavy; I put my hands by my hipbones to support it and I feel the little one – she’s ready. The métro has just opened so we take it. Four stops: Gare du Nord. It’s already filling up with workers on their way to offices on the other side of town, and we let the escalator carry us up and into the street. It’s started snowing, millions of tiny flakes that melt as soon as they land on your skin. It’s still dark, but the sky is full of them now. They land on people rushing to get to work, on smokers pulling on their last drag, on junkies rolling up their sleeping bags, on cars lining the side of the road, on brasserie canopies, on benches and streetlights and trashcans. My shoes are damp but we’ll be there soon.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s founder and editor-in-chief.

This essay was originally written for Extra Extra magazine’s podcast series ‘Protagonist of the Erotic.’ You can listen to it here.

Anja: Many people complain about the detrimental effects that the speeded up pace of contemporary fashion has on creativity. Is that something you’ve noticed too?

Christophe: Yes, the speed of the business now is crazy. I don’t agree with it. You need time to create and to think, but today designers have to make a new collection every three months. You don’t have a choice. Or I don’t in any case. Pre-collections have become hugely important – if you want to increase sales, you need to offer products as early in the season as possible.

Anja: How do you think that the tempo affects those who work in the industry?

Christophe: There is so much anxiety in this business. People are anxious all the time. Every few months, you have to prove that you’re still at the top of your game. The competition and the time pressure can be overwhelming at times. It’s very hard to achieve something you’re completely satisfied with in the limited time we have now. And at the same time, this is an industry full of sensitive, creative people who are always doubting what they do. I think this is one of the reasons why fashion people sometimes behave in ridiculous ways. We overreact and behave badly. I catch myself doing the same at times.

Anja: What do you think has prompted the industry to accelerate in this way?

Christophe: It’s something that’s been happening for the past ten, fifteen years. Some powerful company must have realised that the earlier they could deliver to stores, the more they would sell. If you deliver your collection in March, as we used to, you have two months to sell it before the sales start – if you deliver in January you have twice as long. Customers have become used to buying summer clothes in January now, so the smaller companies have had to follow suit to keep up. At Hermès I would be choosing fabrics for the winter collection in June/July. In September I would prepare the fashion show for spring/summer and at the same time present research, design ideas and sketches for the winter collection, which would be shown to buyers in early December. In May we would be delivering the winter collection to stores. You’d be surprised if you knew how many clients want to buy fur in May. The wealthy want to show that they’re first with everything.

Anja: Has this affected the way you work at Lemaire too?

Christophe: Yes of course. Our development manager tells us that if we want to reach the next level in our own growth, we’ll have to start showing the womenswear autumn/winter collection in January instead of March. The buyers all come to Paris in January with their budgets now. If you wait to show the collection until after the fashion show in March, it’s too late – the big budgets have been spent. Buyers prioritise brands that they know will deliver early. So of course this shift has deep consequences for our way of working, for how our team is organised, let alone for my peace of mind. But it’s just the way the industry works now; we all have to adapt to survive.

Anja: Do you think that this means that a permanent change for the fashion seasons is under way?

Christophe: Yes, I think eventually what will happen is that the fashion show schedules will shift. They’ll have to happen earlier to accommodate the change in buying. Right now, we’re stuck in between the old and the new rhythm. Fashion is a global business now, and there are so many brands and markets that operate on different seasons. As a designer you have to make sure that you show some wool in the summer season and lighter fabrics in the winter. It’s a bit chaotic now because we have to accommodate two different timings simultaneously.

Anja: On a slightly different note, you’ve received rave reviews these last few seasons, and both critics and buyers seem very susceptible to your vision of discreet sophistication and everyday elegance. Is this something you’ve picked up on also?

Christophe: I’m very aware that this is our moment. Fashion now is about minimalism, a subtle silhouette and everyday garments. What we do fits the trend. But I also know that the only thing you can count on in fashion is that it changes. So I see this as the moment for us to strengthen our team, our communication and our business. We need to become well established enough as a company so that when the tide changes we’ll be strong enough to carry on.

Anja The dichotomy between creativity and business is one that’s very keenly felt in the fashion industry. How do you balance your need for creative expression as a designer with the knowledge that you’re also a business leader who has to always be aware of the bottom line?

Christophe: If you want to endure as a designer today you have to be business savvy. But I’m also aware that when fashion becomes all about business, about profits, it loses the ability to really affect change. It’s a bit sad but the designers that become famous are the ones who play ball and know not to challenge the system too much. When it comes to my own work, I’m an idealist really. I’m interested in history, I’m interested in politics; what drives me is how to create better conditions of life.

Anja: When you say ‘better,’ what do you mean?

Christophe: I’m interested in how clothes are worn in everyday life by regular people. Clothing is so very intimate; it’s about how we want to be seen. Fashion is a projection of an ideal, but to me it’s also tied up with ideology. It should be about liberating a woman or a man from the constraints of untenable ideals. Otherwise being a designer is just about playing with dolls.

Anja: What exactly is important to you in terms of design ideology?

Christophe: To me there is something political in everything. It baffles me that in fashion we seem to think that our work is disconnected from politics, or that it’s pretentious to talk about fashion as something ideological. The work we do at Lemaire is, in its own humble way, very political. We have a very specific point of view about dressing. We communicate so much about ourselves, or about how we want to be seen, by what we wear. So of course it’s political.

Anja: Do you think that fashion has become more or less political since you started?

Christophe: It seems to me that fashion is much more reactionary today than when I started out in the early 1990s. If you read fashion magazines, they seem to be conditioning women to become less independent, more stupid. Follow the crowd; don’t think for yourself. It’s fascinating really. So many women seem to think that they have to run to the sales as soon as they start, and that their worth is measured in the latest shoe or handbag.

Anja: You talked earlier about how the pace of the industry affects designers, but is there anything that can be done to circumvent it?

Christophe: I don’t know if you can circumvent it but you can find a way of dealing with it. When I started I wasn’t confident enough to be at odds with the fashion world. I felt I had to reinvent myself with every collection, which was very stressful. It was only when I understood that the problem wasn’t actually the pace itself, but that I’d bought into the idea of having to renew myself every six months, that I reconciled with the fashion system. I realised that I could actually rework the same garments season after season – that was a very liberating moment actually.

Anja: You seem to have found an interesting way over the years of balancing your own brand with, at times, being a designer for hire at major fashion houses. What are the advantages or disadvantages of working like this?

Christophe: Well, the luxury of having your own brand means that you decide who to listen to. I know firsthand how hard it can be to work for a big corporation: the hypocrisy, the fierceness of big business – everything that is contrary to my own values. Knowing that through my work I can actually provide an alternative to what I don’t like about the fashion system has always motivated me to keep going.

Anja: As a journalist I’ve noticed how the corporate influence has changed the relationship between a designer and the media. The involvement and influence of the PR or agent is hugely important now. Having a PR in the room with you when you do interviews is becoming very common, and often a journalist has to kowtow so much to a fashion brand leading up to the interview moment that when you finally get access to a designer, you’ve become neutered before you even start. Considering your experience working both for major fashion businesses and for yourself, what’s your take on this?

Christophe: At Hermès, they would always place a PR in the room with me when I was being interviewed. If I said something even slightly divisive, they would break in and say, ‘Oh Christophe, maybe you shouldn’t say that – it’s a little bit controversial.’ I realise that an interview is a promotional exercise most of the time now. But I wish it wouldn’t have to be at the expense of the actual opinions or ideology of a designer.

Anja: What do you mean?

Christophe: I’m incredibly frustrated by how enormously powerful fashion conglomerates have become. I’ve seen how it affects the level of honesty and freedom in what critics write. For instance, everybody knows that you can’t say a word against LVMH today. I remember one of the last shows Marc Jacobs did for Louis Vuitton, for autumn/winter 2012, where he showed women dressed all in black with huge hats, in early twentieth-century style. They could barely move. There were men on the catwalk carrying the models’ suitcases, like servants, as if they were on their way to board the Orient Express. But what does this say about the woman of today? Fashion has to say something about life today, about what a modern woman’s life is like. When I saw that Louis Vuitton show, what I saw was a big circus and a lot of money being spent. There was nothing progressive about what a woman should be today. And still, the reviews were all predictably good.

Anja: What’s your opinion on how women are represented in contemporary fashion?

Christophe: Fashion today propagates the wrong idea of femininity or what being sexy is about. Women are told that being sexy is about showing off your body. But what about looking smart?

Anja: You’ve talked in the past about the importance of having a partner in fashion, as you now have Sarah-Linh, and also of working as a team. Why is it important to emphasise fashion as a team effort?

Christophe: How you work together says a lot about the ethics you have as a company. I used to play hockey for a long time; I play soccer. I like team sports. A team has to have very strong ethics. When you succeed, you share the glory, and when you fail, it’s the responsibility of the whole team to correct the flaws. In work, I try to apply the same logic. I want everyone I work with to feel that we’re building something together that’s bigger than any one of us, and that depends on us all. It’s about creating team energy. That doesn’t mean we have to be nice all the time, but it’s about having the right expectations and playing to everybody’s strengths. In a capitalist culture, an enterprise is a little society. I see it like that. Of course, I’m the leader; this is my project. But I could never do it alone.

Anja: The politics of design has been a recurring theme during our conversation, and I’m getting the sense that you’re constantly oscillating between needing to fit in for survival, and wanting to rebel against the system.

Christophe: I try to be radical in my own quiet way. I want to go to the source of what I think is the problem in fashion today and look for long-lasting and profound solutions. That doesn’t mean destroying and replacing everything – that never works. It would be pretentious and conceited to think that I could change the system. The system is what it is. If you want to survive, you have to deal with it. I have employees that depend on me. I’m not an artist. I’m a manager; I can’t take risks that jeopardise the livelihood of those who depend on me. But having said that, I believe in reform. I believe in real democracy. I very much admire the French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès. As he said, one must ‘aller à l’idéal et comprendre le réel.’ Aim for the ideal, but be aware of reality. Small, subtle changes can become very important over time.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Fashion and Slowness.

Louise Riley is a London-based textile artist and illustrator.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.

HE WAS JAPANESE, A painter, about forty. He started talking to me in the foyer of a gallery, while I was waiting in a line to store my coat. ‘What did you think?’ he said, meaning, I presumed, the exhibition. ‘This is the entrance,’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he said.

It was not his exhibition – I should make that clear. When I say he was a painter, I mean that he worked mostly in a pet emporium on Ninety-Sixth and Broadway which housed rabbits bred to look like miniature Dalmatian dogs, in the windows, and which offered on site-grooming sessions and appointments with an animal nutritionist. The animal nutritionist was him, and he kept a canvas in the back, for when shifts were slow. Some of his paintings were OK, had been sold for quite good money in the Nineties – at least, that was what he told me. Now none of them made anything but he kept a brush in his front pocket, all the same, and sketched portraits of society ladies’ spaniels and chinchillas to pay rent. He said, often shaking off some flaky residue of fish food from his arms – he was always paranoid he smelt residually of ‘pond’ – ‘You cannot be a primadonna, about this.’

I didn’t have a pet, but pretended that I did. A cat. ‘Leopold,’ I said. The emporium was en route to my office in the English Literature department and most mornings, I would get a question about him, or an earnest ‘Say hello to the little feline guy.’ I had shown him photos of my friend’s cat in Seattle. ‘He looks well hydrated,’ he would say. ‘That’s unusual, for Manhattan.’

I started going round to his for dinner at the end of autumn, when the leaves were on the point of falling, when the runners started wearing fleecy swathes of cotton bonded to their ears and hands. He avoided corn, and gluten, also dairy – foods that he decided made him ‘fatally apocalyptic.’ He strained his own nut milk using a mesh pouch which he had bought online, and stored batches of red quinoa and adzuki beans in his fridge. Otherwise he seemed to me to eat nothing other than expensive, coarse, dark things – eighty five per cent or higher chocolate, tarry black coffee, wine. He bought tapered cigarettes in lurid pastel colours and rationed them for ‘torpid days.’ ‘I feel this voltage twitching between us,’ he said, on the third or fourth time I went to his house, ‘but I can’t. I’m exercising discipline in my attachments.’

‘The last girl,’ he said. ‘She called me all the time.’

In this there was no risk – I didn’t have his number. We had always arranged seeing one another in the street, outside the shop, and still went out sometimes, at weekends, to over-bright bars which sold drinks which were half cocktails, half desserts – I gave in to the temptation of the tiramisu amaretto, every time. When I went back to the UK, after my time in Manhattan was over, he found and sent a message to my faculty address, asking me to forward him my details, and, if you can believe it, I received a Christmas card from him that same December, with a picture of a lizard wearing a red Santa hat, specks of glitter coming off the front. ‘Greetings,’ it said, inside. Every year now, without fail, he writes to me and sends me something. Last year it was a pyjama shirt, with stripes in pink and blue. I didn’t know if he had been saving it for someone else, or had just wrapped it up several months before he sent it. When I opened up the package, there were moths.

Alice Blackhurst is a writer and scholar based in Cambridge, UK.

Wolfgang Tillmans is a photographer and artist based in London.