An Exercise in Futility: The K-Swiss Classic Luxury Edition

K-Swiss sells two (count em: two) styles of shoe in Extra Wide: The Classic and the Classic Luxury Edition (CLE). They each come in two colors, white and black. So that's technically four. Sue me.

Back before anyone was born, K-Swiss used to make the Classic in California with leather imported from Argentina, D-Rings made in Germany, and rubber soles made by an Italian tire company. Sounds like a sweet shoe, right? That quality is history now, and the Classic is now just a shitty shoe made in China. K-Swiss still sells them, but only to stubborn old-timers who refuse to buy anything else. They are uncomfortable and unsupportive, offering little over walking barefoot.

The CLE is a moderate step up in quality and design. It cleans up the five stripe look and provides a little more padding around the heel. But the shoes still leave a lot to be desired. The rubber sole makes it feel like walking on a brick. The shoe never quite molds to your foot; the leather still rubs a blister on my toe from time to time. And even if you can handle a long day slumming and bumming, these shoes can't; expect sore feet by dinnertime.

Here's the thing, though: if your feet are wider than a 2E, this is your only sneaker option. You can't switch to Converse All-Stars or retro New Balance trainers. There's this and there's dorky running shoes. That's it.

Which means, despite all the shortcomings listed here (not to mention the fact that the five stripe design isn't nearly as iconic and classy as K-Swiss seems to think it is) the CLE's are a regular part of my shoe rotation.

Story Time: Earlier this month (March) my black CLE's were getting old (and painful to walk in), so I went to kswiss.com to order some more, only to find that they didn't have my size. In fact, they didn't have a lot of sizes. Fearing the worst, I emailed K-Swiss customer service to see if there was a temporary inventory shortage, or (gulp) K-Swiss was discontinuing the only pair of sneakers on the market that fit my feet.

Their response? I quote: "Thank you for contacting K-Swiss customer service. We are currently out of them. There are more Black Classic Luxury Edition size 12 XW coming on 7/11/2013."

That's right. July. Four months. What is this, Soviet Russia? This is America; I can get bacon rush delivered to my mouth, but I gotta wait four months for shoes?

Customer service went on to say that I could try Amazon or Zappos, but that brings up another issue. If you go to Amazon to buy a pair of K-Swiss Classics, you'll notice that you have a number of buying options. Scroll through the pictures of the five different shoes available. If you look closely, you can tell that some of the pictures are of Classics, and some are of CLE's. Do the people selling the shoes know the difference between the two? Who knows! It's shoe roulette!

This shit-poor customer service is another bad sign for a company that is quickly vanishing from the public eye. The Nike's and Adidas's of the world are always switching up their style to appeal to another generation of shoe buyers. K-Swiss feels like it's stuck in neutral. Which is good for us, sadly, because that means they'll keep making those Extra-Wide CLE's.

Or will they? K-Swiss is in the process of being bought. There's some nice and shiny quotes about the potential for the K-Swiss brand in that article, but that's what you're supposed to say when you buy a company. Whether K-Swiss is even around to make extra wide sneakers in a few years is anyone's guess. And if the CLE's are discontinued, our options for sneakers runs bone dry.

An Ode to the Sneaker

There are moments in life that make it worth living.

You read a statement like that, and certain events come to mind. Weddings. Bar Mitzvahs. Birthday Parties. Birth of children.

Except, really, those moments suck. Okay, maybe not the birth of a child, but those other ones? They’re planned. Rehearsed. You already know what’s going to happen before it happens and yeah it’s special but you knew it was going to be special and that takes the shine off it.

What I’m talking about transcends planning. The spontaneous road trip to god-knows-where. Running into that cute girl at the grocery store. A pickup basketball game with that one old guy who won’t stop taking three point hook shots, causing uproarious laughter every time he air balls.

This is probably something you don’t think about when you’re in those moments: the shoes you’re wearing. Most people don’t think about it because they know exactly what to wear: sneakers. Your go-to shoes. Comfortable, versatile, and speaking to your personality in some subtle way.

In theory, the choices people with wide feet have in footwear have never been better. Running shoes, Oxford shoes, hell, even sandals come in wide widths nowadays. But there’s a distinct gap in the sneaker category. The shoes that are up for anything apparently aren't up for odd-sized feet.

The shoes people love—the Converse All-Stars with the soles worn to nothing, the skater shoes with the hole in the pinky toe, to the Air Jordans that get cleaned with a toothbrush—these are the shoes that we have to live without. We’re like eunuchs, or the servants at Downton Abbey: that kind of love just isn't available to us.

This blog will focus on wide width shoes of all categories, and yes, that maddening company known as New Balance will get a lot of ink. But the real, major pitfall of having wide-width feet, of not being able to get that one pair of sneakers that are just right, that’ll be the main focus. I hope you'll come along for the ride.