Marty McFly’s faux self-lacing Nikes from Back to the Future II launched a decades-long effort to make “electro adaptive reactive lacing” technology a reality.
There’s a scene in Back to the Future II where Marty McFly, sitting in the DeLorean, slips on a pair of what look like Rollerblades without wheels. Zip, whir—they tighten themselves and light up. “Power laces. All right!” It’s one of the many technological achievements the film, which is set in 1985 and 2015, predicts for the future.
Fast-forward to October 21, 2015, the date Marty and Doc traveled to, but on the space-time continuum you and I share: “Doc, it seems like 2015 kinda sucks,” Michael J. Fox tells Christopher Lloyd. They’re on the set of Jimmy Kimmel Live, reprising their characters.
Doc: “Yes. Apparently, the technological and cultural achievements of this era”—waves hands disapprovingly—“are somewhat underwhelming.” He continues: “I believe we may have traveled into an alternate 2015, where human evolution has been stopped by superfluous technology.”
Kimmel takes a selfie; Doc takes an Uber back to 1985; Huey Lewis plays “Back in Time” through the commercial break; and Fox shows Kimmel his self-lacing tennis shoes, the coveted Nike Mags, a pair of which the sneaker reseller StockX reports to have sold recently for $76,925.
Marty McFly’s famous Nike Mags, fit with functional self-lacing technology, were unveiled on October 21, 2015, the date that Marty and Doc travel to in Back to the Future II.
The Nike Mags are a star of Future Now, the latest exhibition at the Portland Art Museum. It’s a survey of sneaker history, grounded with a few twentieth century examples of the industry’s roots, but focused primarily on hypermodern, at times unsettlingly unreal examples of where its curator, Elizabeth Semmelhack, director of Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, believes footwear is headed: into the simulation.
When Back to the Future II came out in 1989, self-lacing technology didn’t exist. It was nothing a little movie magic couldn’t solve. For reasons I haven’t quite been able to understand, sneaker people really wanted it to exist. Kimmel and Fox only spent a moment chatting about the shoes (Kimmel: “What a time-saver, huh?”), which made for an anticlimactic reveal of the decades-long pursuit to develop “electro adaptive reactive lacing.” But, excusing the contrived narrative, there is something profound about closing that time-warping loop: “fake” technology made real, on schedule, to debut at the moment Hollywood predicted its arrival, decades on.
MSCHF’s Big Red Boots are sold as “Cartoon boots for a cool 3D world.”
The Nike Mag is a warm-up for the headier virtualities the exhibition holds, though the ambition to arrive in the future wearing the right shoes applies to every single pair on display. Alas, they unanimously, tragically, fantastically fail, and instead reflect the very specific times in which they were made. There are the notorious Big Red Boots of February 2023, remarkably efficient at signaling to the world that you have too much money and time to spend on social media. And the Adidas Micropacer from 1984, the first shoe to record a runner’s distance, pace, and calories burned, which (super conveniently) displayed the data on a calculator screen affixed to the left tongue, poking through its space-age silver-gilt leather.
I was wary of how affecting a shoe show could be, until, after wading through for a few hours, I felt the intense escapist sensibility of any other art show, at least the successful ones.
Zaha Nova (2013) by Rem D. Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid
Aesthetically, the most interesting shoes come from fashion designers and architects. Rem D. Koolhaas (nephew of Rem Koolhaas, the famed Dutch modernist architect) is quoted on a didactic panel saying, eloquently, “shoes that don’t look like shoes can be the most exciting shoes.” His collaboration with the late British Iraqi architect Dame Zaha Hadid, titled Zaha Nova (2013), molds chromed fiberglass stacks, offset in layers, to make a sexy pair of pumps fit for a stormtrooper.
Nearby, a pair of boots from 2000 by the French designer Benoît Méléard float on cantilever heels and sport periwinkle-blue dots, like a leather Twister mat wrapped around futurist go-go boots. In the next room are the first-ever pair of go-go boots, from André Courrèges’s 1964 “Space-Age” collection—a relic of space race propaganda.
French designer Benoît Méléard’s polka-dot boots from his summer 2000 collection
Space is an enduring muse for shoe designers, but another frontier headlines this show. Virtual reality and its intersections with sneaker culture are presented with such reverence that the word “simulation” stopped meaning existential collapse à la The Matrix and instead connoted a smart and efficient way to keep all of one’s belongings safe from the mess of material reality.
There’s both VR equipment (hardware) and the virtual products one finds inside the metaverse. Equipment, or “haptic” devices, include shoes with highly synchronized wheels that enable a person to walk around in the metaverse without moving from the same spot in their living room. Virtual sneakers, meaning those that exist only in concept and are sold via cryptocurrency to be worn by the buyer’s digital avatar, are presented with the stance that touching down in material reality would sully the impossible grace that’s achievable only in a space freed of the requirements of the “real” world. This is a familiar sentiment: every artist’s materials are constantly failing them. The actual work, whatever it may be, can never hold the nuance of the inspiration inside the artist’s head.
Sneakers do function strangely as a portal between the internet and the real world. Putting your Big Red Boots literally on the ground is unsettling precisely because seeing a person wear them feels like watching a hologram walk down the street. To the designers’ point, they’re not fit for this world.
Semmelhack, the curator, seems convinced that physical sneakers—in line behind file cabinets, Rolodexes, landlines, one could say magazines—are soon to be obsolete. But there it is: preference prevails. In the extensive interviews included in the exhibition’s accompanying book, even the most blockchain-tangled virtual designers contest that getting swept into the metaverse is a distant and likely niche way people would want to live. The outlandish, surreal shoes that come out of the metaverse and into the universe are evidence of that.
I’m not convinced this show knows where shoes are headed, but it does make extremely clear that, as a society, we want to travel back and forth through time, to the moon or into the metaverse—anywhere but here. And we want to be wearing the right shoes when we get there.
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