Cartoon shoes and clothes: The worst fashion trend of the year?

For whatever reason, this was the year that cartoon fashion tried to become a thing. Consider this Loewe outfit, displayed at the Womenswear Spring/Summer 2023 show in Paris. Love it or hate it, it was certainly one of the years most original trends.

Consider the bottom half of the look featuring pixelated pants and more overdrawn lines. What do you think? Fun or run?

Believe it or not, the hottest thing to come out of this year’s New York Fashion Week street style was this cartoonish pair of gigantic rubber boots made by Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF. To help drum up their hype, many celebs began wearing them everywhere, like DJ Steve Aoki seen here at an NBA game.

While the Big Red Boots are strikingly original outside of a cartoon, fashion brand Loewe already debuted its Minnie Mouse-style pumps at the Paris Fashion week Spring/Summer 2023 show, foreshadowing the growing trend.

Besides the absurd cartoon boots, country singer Shania Twain wore this hyper cartoonish look by Harris Reed to the 2023 Grammy Red Carpet.

But back to the Big Red Boots. A-list actress and singer has been one of the boot’s most prominent fans. On her Twitter, she’s posted photos and videos of her gardening in them, playing basketball in them and just chilling in front of a cozy fireplace tapping her bouncy red heels.

Image: @JanelleMonae / Twitter

The MSCHF boots are not just style, they have also been used for professional stomping too. In a 2023 WWE wrestling match, wrestler Seth Rollins performed his signature “curb stomp” move in the boots to win the match.

Image: wwe and wwerollins / Instagram

Australian singer Iggy Azalea was treating the boots to a super fancy private jet experience as well. Comments on her Instagram included “not a cute trend at all,” “the hottest” and “how did you get the boots off tho…?”

Image: thenewclassic /Instagram

Skateboarder and shoe influencer George Esteve also demonstrated the boot’s apparent functionality by wearing them for a skateboarding video posted to TikTok and Instagram.

Image: george.esteve / TikTok

With all the hype around these boots being the new big thing in fashion, they literally sold out in seconds after they first went up for sale earlier this year for $350 per pair. They were then being sold on the secondary market for thousands of dollars until they came back in stock.

Image: mschfsneakers / Instagram

In the product description, MSCHF says the cartoon boots are for a cool 3D world. “Cartoonishness is an abstraction that frees us from the constraints of reality… The continued blending of virtual and IRL [in real life] aesthetics has us chasing supernormal stimuli… Big Red Boots are VR [virtual reality] chat boots.”

The clearest inspiration for the boots is Astro Boy, the lead character in a manga-turned-cartoon and videogame character who is a robot who strives to become more human.

MSCHF mentions the cartoon plumber as another inspiration, explaining that animators created a primitive form that was easy to reproduce frame after frame but still conveyed the idea of a boot. “Big red boots are really not shaped like feet, but they are extremely shaped like boots,” continues the product description.

The brand mentions the Armadillo shoes that hit designer Alexander McQueen's spring/summer 2010 runway. "McQueen's armadillo heels tripped on the runway so that the BRB (Big Red Boots) could run to the corner store," says the product description, adding that "the aesthetic Overton window continues to stretch open towards the unreal."

Despite all the hype, people are torn by the totally absurd footwear. On the MSCHF Instagram post about the boots, one user called them “a social experiment on how people are easily influenced into making senseless decisions” another said they were asking people to talk them out of buying the boots.

Image: thenewclassic / Instagram

Social media users were also debating the artistic and ethical merits of the boots. One user said “these boots are high art,” to which another replied: “Wouldn’t call it high art as much as peak capitalism,” and another said, “awe. Ignorance must be bliss. Bless your heart.”

Image: Lil Wayne wearing the boots. lilwaynefangang and lilwayneganggang / Instagram

Fans also complained because the app to buy the boots seemed to have crashed for many users who were desperate to get their foot-shaped feet in the boot-shaped boots ASAP. “Your app kept crashing !!!, kicked me off and when i finally got through everything sold out !! I dreamed about these boots all night only to wake up and get nothin,” posted one user.

Image: Salemstatealum / Instagram

People hated crocs with a passion, too. But now almost everyone has a pair in their house. While the rubbery plastic boots and shoes are being compared widely, crocs are known to be extremely practical and comfy.

Speaking to Mashable, YouTuber Steve Natto described his experience wearing the shoes for a week because.. everyone was dying to know. He said the shoes felt similar to Crocs or other foam shoes like Yeezy Foam Runners. He said once he got used to them, he could wear them for long periods of time. At the same time, taking them on and off was easy once you were used to it, he added.

Image: @SteveNatto / YouTube

"They're surprisingly comfortable... they're definitely just big and a little bulky and feel way different at least on the height of your foot or leg compared to any other shoes. But when you're actually walking, whatever they've done to the insole and how the shoe feels it is actually kind of comfortable," Natto continued.

Image: @SteveNatto / YouTube

Natto, who is a content creator in the sneaker world, described how the boots showed up unsolicited. "One day they just showed up at my door, and they were just pretty crazy to see. Definitely big and red. And yeah, I was excited to check them out," he continued.

Image: WWE and wwerollins / Instagram

MSCHF isn’t exactly a serious fashion label. Their past products include a cologne that smells like WD-40, a popsicle that looks like Mark Zuckerberg and a Fruit Loops box containing just one giant fruit loop. Being “art,” some of the other seemingly novelty products are fetching high prices on the secondary market.

Image: mschf / Instagram