AVAVAV Fall/Winter 2023 - Fake It Till You Break It

I had a pair of these as a kid. I think my mom bought them, and I outgrew them so quickly that most of the time they were a size too small, so they were arguably the least comfortable shoes I've ever worn. Still loved them tho :)

Heelys were invented by Roger Adams, a clinical psychologist who grew up in his parents' roller skating rink in Tacoma, Washington. On a 1998 vacation in Huntington Beach, in the middle of what he described as a midlife crisis, he watched kids on inline skates and pictured a shoe that could roll whenever you shifted your weight. He built his first prototype in a friend's garage by cutting into Nike sneakers and fitting them with skateboard wheel bearings. His first patent filing for the design dates to April 1, 1999. He launched the company in 2000, and at its first trade show, the first retailer sold out within hours. Priced between $50 and $100, Heelys sold more than 1.25 million pairs in its first year, reached more than 30 countries within three years, and got celebrity fans like Usher. They also drew criticism from doctors and safety groups over injuries in school hallways and elsewhere. Adams eventually sold his shares and left the company, and he died in March 2026 at age 71. What a legend!

On July 5, 1946, French engineer Louis Réard unveiled his new two-piece swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor, a fashionable swimming pool in Paris. He named it the "bikini" after Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. military had tested an atomic bomb just four days earlier, because he hoped his design would be just as explosive. It was tiny: a bra top and two inverted triangles of fabric joined by string, made from about 30 inches of material and small enough to fit inside a matchbox. No professional model would wear it, so Réard hired Micheline Bernardini, an 18-year-old dancer at the Casino de Paris. The suit was printed with newspaper type, a nod to the headlines Réard expected it to make, and Bernardini reportedly received around 50,000 fan letters afterward. A rival designer, Jacques Heim, had launched a two-piece called the "Atome" and advertised it as "the world's smallest bathing suit," but Réard's was even smaller. The reaction was intense: the bikini was banned in countries including Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Australia, and the Vatican declared it sinful. It didn't catch on widely in America until the 1960s, helped along by films like Dr. No in 1962.

Workers in the American West, from miners to ranchers to railroad crews, kept ripping their work pants at the pockets and seams. Jacob Davis, a tailor from Riga, Latvia, working in Reno, Nevada, who also made tents and wagon covers, came up with a fix: hammer copper rivets into the stress points, like the corners of the pockets and the base of the button fly. He didn't have the money to patent the idea himself, so he wrote to his fabric supplier, the San Francisco dry-goods merchant Levi Strauss, and proposed a partnership. On May 20, 1873, the two received U.S. Patent No. 139,121 for "an Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings," the date now celebrated as the birthday of blue jeans. The pants were first known simply as "XX," then as "waist overalls," and in 1890 they became the 501 when Levi's introduced lot numbers. Davis stayed on as a factory manager at Levi Strauss & Co. for the rest of his career, and the rivets they patented are still on almost every pair of jeans made today.