SWEAR London sneakers

shoes for starting a fight in

In 1996, a sheep was successfully cloned for the first time; Space Jam hit theaters; and in London, José Neves and Jorge Sampaio founded a shoe company that would become the foamsmith of the world’s chunkiest club shoes.

SWEAR is a great, forgotten sneaker producer of the 1990s. Their shoes are often compared to fellow platform footwear giant Buffalo, but SWEAR’s shoes have more of an abstract relationship with the human form: they’re heavy, roughly boulder-shaped, and they often include elements you can add or remove with Velcro, laces, or bungee cords, like a little 3-D puzzle you wear on your feet. For example, this pair of stompers has a neon green pouch you can Velcro over the laces, and this blue and yellow pair comes with with removable horns on the toe and heel. A listing for their Mad Planet sneakers at the Museum of Design in Plastics catalogues three (three!) different styles of interchangeable Velcro patches and bobbles.

SWEAR London relaunched as a customizable sneaker brand in 2017, and they are still mildly zeitgeisty — they collabed with Vetements and Gypsy Sport in 2018. But the newer models lack the goth clown zeal of the ’90s originals.

Unfortunately, vintage SWEARs are hard to find. An Etsy seller in Miramas, France came by about a dozen pairs a couple years ago, most of which are now sold out. (There are two pairs left on her Depop.) The cheapest I can find them is $127 on American Mercari and €100 (about $113) for a very clowny pair of Street Mix 05s on Vinted, where you’ll have to pay for shipping from France. There are a few pairs in the $200 to $300 range, which is, in my opinion, too much to pay for a pair of going-out shoes that some sellers warn will fall apart quickly if you actually wear them out.

Screenshot from archived version of technosnobbery.com

I also don’t know that they’re wearable today! They look pretty weird on an actual human foot! Buy them if you want, but if not, please enjoy this exhaustive archive of SWEAR pics from Techno Snobbery, a bygone cyber fashion blog by writer Rosie the Raver. “It may not look like it…but SWEARs are actually endangered species. Need to catalogue this shit while we can,” Rosie writes. “Poor SWEARs are dying off every day.”