The Tamesis
A few weeks ago, a pitch for the shoe brand Reef landed in my inbox. Founded in 1984 by two surf-loving Argentinian brothers, the San Diego-based company has become a popular footwear choice among Southern California beach bums, with an initial investment of $4,000 and a valuation of $187.7 million when acquired by VF Corporation in 2005 (later sold to Rockport Group in 2018 for an undisclosed amount). What’s the reason for the pitch? It’s Fanning style – corkscrews embedded in the soles – and it’s 21 years old (drinking age, get it?).
I didn’t think much of it at the time. A native of Southern California, Reeve felt more like a frat boy or a cold father. Sure, the brand is popular in certain circles, has a sporty vibe and is the undisputed first choice for a certain comfort-conscious clientele. But is this fashion? Stylish? Not sure.
Back last week, I noticed The Row’s latest seasonal footwear products were starting to arrive: bohemian braided slippers, pilgrim loafers, sleek slippers. One style in particular stands out for me – the Dan Sandal, a flip-flop with a thick calfskin suede foot strap in tobacco brown with delicate topstitching. My synapses started firing. Could it be that my eyes deceived me? Does this nearly $1,100 trigger bring Big Reef Energy?
I did an inner check and showed a photo of Dan to my dear colleagues, and they confirmed my suspicions: the style does, in fact, have a distinctly reefy energy to it. Specifically, a mild callback to their best-selling Ojai Classic. In many ways, it’s the sibling of The Row’s women’s beach sandals.
Now my initial instinct was to be hesitant about this design. Compared to last summer’s elegantly streamlined, understatedly sexy dune and city flip-flops, these flip-flops have a bulky, bulky, bro-like feel. They’re the boys’ roughage to a Dune girl’s dinner.
But I took a breath and reminded myself that I absolutely trust the amazing fashion experts Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to know what’s cool and what’s cool. ideal— long before the rest of us. This is their job! I mean, no one was crazy about flip-flops until last summer, and then the dunes dropped, and their implicit approval instantly catapulted the style to summer shoe status seemingly overnight (despite—or because of?—the hefty price tag).
So if they intuited that our feet would be craving a silhouette with more weight, texture, and presence this season, who am I to say they were wrong? This is a shoe that does not tiptoe delicately, but strides proudly. And, it should be noted, it’s not like the wider straps that Reef invented or particularly popularized. Many brands, such as Rainbow, have similar styles.
In fact, the Olsens have a supernatural understanding of what we don’t know we want yet. Here, they’re not an invention, but a savvy iteration: a thicker, chunkier strap that’s enough to build on the trend they created and inject a little life into us to make us reconsider it. It makes sense that they’d lean toward this slightly goofy surfer vibe—the Olsens are California girls at heart. Perhaps, this speaks to some nostalgia they may be feeling – perhaps for the days of powerful, millennial mall brands that captivated certain corners of the internet. Paired with some baggy cargo shorts, it suddenly looked less like a frat house and more like an idealized Bruce Weber-Abercrombie ad version of a frat house—two related but distinct things.
