Rick Owens Spring/Summer 2014 - 'Vicious'

Fundamentally Ridiculous!

ATI Strength Shoes, made by a company called Athletic Training Innovations, were built around a raised heel platform that kept the heel from touching the ground during training, forcing the calf muscles and Achilles tendon to support the body's full weight instead. The idea was that this extra load would translate into a higher vertical jump and faster sprint times, and the shoes were marketed specifically to basketball, football, volleyball, and track athletes chasing those gains. They typically shipped with a training DVD, a laminated workout card, and a stretch strap, and ads claimed they could add anywhere from five to ten inches to a user's vertical jump and shave roughly two-tenths of a second off a 40-yard dash. Through the 1990s and 2000s, they became a fixture of sporting goods catalogs like Eastbay, turning them into a recognizable, incredibly goofy piece of gym-class and backyard-training nostalgia for a whole generation.

The science behind them, though, didn't hold up well. A 1996 peer-reviewed study had untrained college-age men train for ten weeks in either Strength Shoes or regular shoes, and found only minimal, statistically insignificant performance gains in both groups, while the Strength Shoe group suffered a much higher injury rate, seven of ten dropouts in that group were due to training injuries, compared to just one in the regular-shoe group. A separate 1993 study with experienced track athletes found that the regular-shoe group actually outperformed the Strength Shoe group across every test measured, with some Strength Shoe users reporting shin pain. Sports scientist Fred Hatfield, reviewing the research, concluded plainly that he couldn't recommend them.

Edith Head won eight Academy Awards for Costume Design, still the record for the category and the most Oscars ever won by a woman, from 35 nominations between 1949 and 1973. Her winning films were The Heiress, All About Eve, Samson and Delilah, A Place in the Sun, Roman Holiday, Sabrina, The Facts of Life and The Sting. She started at Paramount Pictures in 1923 as a sketch artist under Howard Greer. In 1938 she became the studio's chief costume designer, the first woman to hold the job, and she moved to Universal in 1967. Along the way she created Dorothy Lamour's sarong in The Jungle Princess and put Audrey Hepburn in toreador pants for Sabrina and Funny Face, which helped bring a casual California look into mainstream American fashion. She wore glasses with blue lenses on set so she could preview how her costumes would read on black-and-white film. Head described her job as changing "people into something they weren't," calling it "a cross between camouflage and magic." She became a celebrity in her own right through magazine columns, Vogue pattern licensing and regular TV appearances, and her round glasses and blunt bob are so recognizable that rumors persist she was the inspiration for Edna Mode in The Incredibles.

In 1983, British actress and singer Jane Birkin, who lived in Paris, found herself seated next to Hermès chief executive Jean-Louis Dumas on an Air France flight from Paris to London. As she put her overstuffed wicker basket in the overhead compartment, it spilled, and she complained that nice bags were never big enough to carry everything she needed. Dumas offered to make her one. She sketched her ideal bag right there on an airsickness bag, describing it as "bigger than the Kelly but smaller than Serge's suitcase," a reference to her partner Serge Gainsbourg. Hermès introduced the Birkin in 1984 and delivered her original, a black leather bag with her initials on the flap, in 1985. She used it hard, filling it with her belongings and covering it in stickers and charms, and it had personal touches the commercial version never got, such as a non-removable shoulder strap and an attached nail clipper. In 2015 she asked Hermès to take her name off the bag after a PETA report alleged cruelty at crocodile farms, and Hermès suspended work with the farms named. The bag's story came full circle in July 2025, when her original prototype sold at Sotheby's in Paris for 8.6 million euros, including fees, roughly $10.1 million in total. That made it the most expensive handbag ever sold at auction, far ahead of the previous record of about $513,000.