Please, can we leave the classic Mary Jane shoe alone?

There are certain fashion choices that our future selves will look back on and think: why? Enter the Mary Jane shoe as an unrelenting force to be reckoned with. Will it be a regrettable choice later? We’ll let time decide. As of now, it stays and how. Before we assess this new phenomenon, we must consider the pleather jeggings of the early 2010s. Or when people used to wear oversized T-shirts with big wide belts. Or during the Tumblr era, when everyone started dying their armpit hair. Some fashion choices are so specific to the time from whence they came that they should stay there, never to be revived again, a fashion fossil that must only be unearthed for strictly academic reasons.

This, I personally believe, is how our future selves will look back on the Mary Jane-ification of everything. You know what I’m talking about. All of our favourite shoes inexplicably transforming into Mary Janes: Ugg boots, Salomon trainers, and now… the Adidas Samba? The Mary Jane is like a virus, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down. If we’re not careful, we’ll have Mary Jane wellies and Mary Jane crocs and Mary Jane hiking boots. Oh wait, all of those things already exist.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out how we got here. 2020s fashion has thus far been defined by ugly, hybrid-style footwear, and what could be more ugly and hybrid than a cut ’n’ pasted Mary Jane (they’re already a sinister shoe; what’s with the random hole? And why do they look like they’re for adult babies?). As my colleague Daniel Rodgers wrote of smart shoes being melted into sneakers, “the intersection of ugliness and cool has simply become… convention,” adding that this is “what happens when the convergent forces of meme culture and streetwear combine, producing silhouettes that simultaneously repel and draw people in.”

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Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images

It’s true: there’s something very online about the Mary Jane-ification of every shoe possible. I can already see the TikTok menswear heads in Adidas Samba MJs and ankle-grazing jorts come spring (hopefully with socks) and the “come with me to try the new viral blah blah” crowd in those fluffy Ugg Bea Marys. As with any ugly shoe, they’re also sort of designed to drum up discourse. The more “cursed” a shoe appears, the more the extremely online fashion crowd are likely to cop (lest we forget the summer of snoafers). It’s something we’ve all seen before.