Ugg(ly) Boots
3 October 2005
The transition from summer to fall is in the air and in all the fashion mags. This means it’s the time of year again when Ugg Australia flaunts full-page ads for their foot and boot wear.
The hope is that American readers will read “Ugg” and make positive associations along the lines of wooly, fluffy, cute, fun, warm boot.
Because I’m Australian, my associations with Ugg are quite different, as in …
Ugg boots: Very ugly (hence Ugg), extremely daggy Australian sheepskin boot that no stylish Australian would be caught dead wearing outdoors, i.e. in public.
During the seventies many Australians wore Uggs with jeans (mostly), and in public! These were the mullet-headed Bogans (a subculture of rough, working class suburban Australians), who definitely were not known for being stylish sophisticates.
Bogans, and Uggs with jeans outdoors, disappeared with the advent of the yuppyfied ‘80s.
Fast-forward to October 2005: My mum, Beaty, wears Uggs. Beaty is sixty-seven. She’s a lovely, very daggy post-menopausal mummy, now grandmother (due to my younger sister Sara and her hubby Phil adopting a Chinese baby girl).
In other words, Beaty is a retiree who makes sensible, which sometimes translates into fashionably unattractive, older-person choices. Not that I’m an ageist, I mean the reality is Beaty is Jane Fonda’s vintage.
Anyway, on cold autumnal mornings, when Beaty falls out of bed and plants her tootsies on the floor, she reaches for her snuggly Uggs, because they are sensible substitutes for slippers, those indoor accessories one wears indoors!
Something happened to make Uggs popular outdoor footwear in the U.S. I think that something was Pamela Anderson at the beach in Baywatch sporting a bikini with her big blonde hair and bulging boobage toppling over skinny legs shoved into Uggs.
This was a fashion oxymoron extraordinaire such that Pamela looked extraordinarily like an unstylish moron. Which begs the question: How did she make Uggs popular?
It was those clever Ugg marketing fiends! They really worked the association of Pam in bikini and Uggs equals sexy.
Then some of the Hollywood girls caught on, pairing Uggs with jeans or a skirt for lunching and shopping etc. etc., and voila the look was totally out of control and unfortunately, popular!
I think the evolution of this trend leaves the field wide open for say, London Fog to jump on the bandwagon and create a line of erotic, rubber wellies in colors that mix and match with their Anoraks!
