Above: Toms Shoes founder Blake Mycoski and fellow do-gooder Lauren Bush
This sounds kind of
idiotic, but until I watched "For Tomorrow," it had never occurred to
me that shoes were so important. Obviously, owning a pair of shoes is a
quality-of-life issue, but it's hardly intuitive that something so basic could
also affect a person's health and the future of whole communities. How did you
make that connection?
It wasn't intuitive for me, either, but then I went down to Argentina to
learn how to play polo, and while I was there I met some kids, and the shoe
thing became pretty instantly obvious. At first, it was a quality-of-life issue
for me—these kids were walking miles to school, miles to get water, in bare
feet, and that pained me. But the more I looked into it, the more I became
aware of the medical ramifications of not wearing shoes, like there are
diseases that come in through the feet, and—
Stop. I suspect I'm a
little squeamish about foot-borne diseases.
Wow, I could show you pictures from Ethiopia that would blow your mind.
Podoconiosis is rampant there. It's a disease that comes from working barefoot
in regions with a high silicon content in the soil, and it makes people's feet
swell up, like—
Aaaahhhh!!! Back to
shoes? Please? Back to fashion…?
I was getting to that. Podoconiosis sort of inspired our new launch of a
boot-style Toms for women. Polo and podoconiosis. I realized I was going to
need a higher-end style if I wanted to extend the one-for-one formula to the
podoconiosis victims, because the footwear they need is really specialized and
expensive. Which is where the polo comes in, because I wanted to make a boot
that was wearable for fall, but still looked very Toms, you know? And then I
started thinking about the bandages polo players use to wrap their horses'
legs. They're quite sexy, in a way—I even made a movie about it.
Another documentary?
Nope. An actual narrative short I wrote and directed. "For Tomorrow"
got me totally inspired. It's about a girl who dreams of marrying a polo player
when she grows up, and then she does, and then she discovers that she's
destined to be a polo widow, the analogue being a golf widow here in the
States. Her husband loves his horse more than he loves her, maybe—she has to
steal a trick from those polo bandages in order to get his attention. Which is
where the Toms boots come back in. But seriously, the wraps, they're very
erotic.
I think we've stumbled
onto rather awkward territory for an interview again. Let's talk about shoe
drops. I noticed on the Toms Web site that you're taking applications for
people who'd like to participate in a drop. Where are you planning to go next?
This isn't next, but later this year we'll be doing our first drop in the United States .
It's unbelievable to think that, even here, lack of shoes is an issue, but when
word started getting out about Toms, I'd get letters from parents and from teachers,
begging me to help out their kids. It's been a while in the planning, but we'll
be dropping shoes in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast .
Which means, maybe, that some Toms-wearing hipsters who head down there for
Mardi Gras or something will actually run into kids wearing the identical
shoes. That's one-for-one in action. I like that idea.
By Maya Singer
Photo by Sherly Rabbani and Josephine Solimene
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