Gazelles are everywhere. 

By Gazelles, I mean the striped suede Adidas shoe, not the African plain dweller — which has lately been conspicuously absent from the street style scene. Succeeding the Adidas Sambas as the shoe of the cool kid, Gazelles started getting attention in the summer of 2022, when the Adidas Gazelle x Gucci collection — featuring the shoe’s chunky silhouette in Gucci’s classic bold colors, snakeskin and G-monogram patterns — hit the market. Since then, I have not been able to put together an outfit without imagining it with a pair of Gazelles, which I do not own. At night, I dream about those suede stripes.

After spending an unhealthy amount of time coveting the shoe, I began to wonder why it had been able to consume my style imagination to such an extreme. I am a firm believer that every piece of clothing you put on your body conveys a message to the rest of the world. And it dawned on me that perhaps the reason I was so obsessed with Gazelles was that I couldn’t for the life of me decide what they were trying to get across.

It’s important to note that the message of an article of clothing is inherently altered by its cultural response. While obviously a bright and busily patterned sweater is going to say something very different from a brown sweatshirt, the narratives of clothes are derived from more than just their color, cut and fabric content. This is all to say that Gazelles are currently communicating something very different than what they were two years ago. If I decided to purchase a pair tomorrow, I would not be able to untangle that decision from the fact that this is a shoe that, like I said, is everywhere. At this point you cannot get this shoe in a vacuum — you can’t separate it from its cultural meaning. This is evident even in the very name Gazelle; the shoe has a name, an identity. That carries weight.

This truth begs the question: to what extent are Gazelles, or any trending item for that matter, just a costume?

In the wake of the pandemic, Harper’s Bazaar fashion news director Rachel Tashjian noticed a subtle shift in consumer culture. “Mostly it seems that people are doing things humans have done for most of the past century — relaxing, working hard, having martinis, not having martinis — but now we cannot resist the urge to package them into something that feels more meaningful than mere consumer choices,” she said in a 2022 article. And she’s not wrong. More than ever, there is a pressure for every outfit decision, playlist addition and coffee order to cohere into the formation of a commodifiable individual — someone who can be categorized into one of the approximately one million aesthetic niches you can find scrolling on TikTok or Pinterest. So, if society is increasingly moving towards these pre-packed versions of style, each meant to convey layers of interests and status, then where do Gazelles fit in? If Gazelles can transfer seamlessly from an athleisure look to something bordering on boho formal, then what on earth does this shoe say?

A 2015 Vox article entitled “Trends are dead,” does a deep dive investigation on the history and pervasive nature of these aesthetic niches. Reporter Terry Nguyen identified cottagecore as the culprit instigator that gained traction on Tumblr in 2018, and “exists largely as an online state of mind — a moodboard intended for digital cosplay.” 

To me, the idea of cosplay is key here. The first people to identify and aspire to the cottagecore look were likely not raised to pick wildflowers in the meadows of their picturesque bucolic towns. And this truth is most evident in their purposeful pursuit of the aesthetic, because, if you were living the life that inspired the trends, then you would already be wearing the clothes. 

It is quite a different thing to aspire to live a certain way of life than it is to wear the clothes that the internet has designated as indicative of that lifestyle. Perhaps an even more key distinction: it is quite a different thing to appreciate the aesthetic of a lifestyle than it is to want to live that life yourself. Although, yes, the inherent messages conveyed by trends and their movements have faded, I would vehemently disagree with Nguyen that this means trends are dead. Rather, what defines you is whether you participate in trends at all. 

I was talking to my personal-stylist and lifelong-trendsetting mother about my Gazelle conundrum, and she had little sympathy for my obsession. For her, any article of clothing loses all appeal once it approaches critical mass; she covets the uniqueness of a piece just as much as a certain color or print. She wasn’t swayed by my argument that it really is a cute shoe, cutting me off to say: “I either would have been the first person to have it, or I wouldn’t have had it at all.”

I have always thought that my mom swings too far in the anti-trend direction. She has always hated the idea of being like anyone else so much that she is often incapable of seeing the artistic or stylistic merit of things that are popular. For her, style is all about the appearance of intent. 

But isn’t that putting on a costume, too? When you know that your clothes communicate something about you, it’s easy to obsess over the exact message that you want to send. So how much should we factor in the cultural significance of an item of clothing into our perception of it? 

My specific issue with identifying my feelings on Gazelles is that, while I do believe that they are a trend, they are also a good, timeless, basic shoe. They’re cute. They’re functional. And design-wise, nothing screams 2024 about them other than the fact that it is currently 2024 and we are living in an era where tennis shoes are an everyday shoe. 

It is no secret that the internet and social media have made us more and more susceptible to suggestion. Did I binge watch the fifth season of Outer Banks because I thought it was cinematographic art? Hardly. My genuine question is whether the same thing is true for Gazelles — because we simply cannot ignore the way in which becoming ubiquitous fundamentally changes the character of something.

Perhaps the new appeal of Gazelles is that they are a ‘peer-reviewed’ shoe. Like it or not, they are now inextricably tied to their identity as the shoe of the season. The message at this point very well could be that the wearer has made their peace with conformity. Or, perhaps, that conformity is exactly what they were looking for.