Keds

The Shoe That Named a Category

Keds holds a place in footwear vocabulary as well as in footwear history. The brand has been around since 1916, when the shoes were first made by U.S. Rubber, now known as Uniroyal, and the first Keds shoes were also the first to be known as sneakers. The explanation given is practical and based on sound: the rubber soles of the shoes made them quiet, so one could sneak around and not worry about being heard, apparently, because hard soled shoes tended to make noise. A whole category of footwear therefore took its common name from a property of this brand's soles. Throughout the years, Keds became immensely popular with many people, including fashion icons, because of their classic and stylish design — a simple court-style shoe whose appeal rested on staying recognisably itself rather than on technical features.

Pro-Keds and the Athletic Branch

In the 1960's and 1970's, Keds introduced a line of athletic shoes called Pro-Keds, which were intended for more serious use, specifically for basketball. Over the years many basketball players and teams wore Pro-Keds shoes while playing. The Pro- prefix separated that line from the classic Keds shoe: one name for the casual, classic design, and a second for performance use on court. Keeping both under the Keds name let the brand appear in two settings at once — everyday wear built on a classic look, and organised sport where the shoe had to be chosen for play rather than appearance. That division also explains the brand's later pattern, in which the classic shoe and the athletic line could rise and fall on different cycles.

Falling Out of Favour, Then Coming Back

The popularity of Keds finally seemed to die out in the mid-to-late 1990's, as other brands became popular with women and the classic Keds fell out of favor. Recently, however, Keds have become popular again, thanks in part to ad campaigns featuring Mischa Barton, star of The O.C. Pro-Keds have also come back into popularity, thanks in part to the current vintage clothing obsession. The two revivals run on different engines: the classic shoe returns through contemporary advertising and a television-associated face, while Pro-Keds returns as a vintage object, valued because it belongs to an earlier era of basketball footwear. A brand founded in 1916 can support both readings at the same time — current product and period piece — because its designs stayed classic long enough to become reference points.

A Quiet Sole in a Loud Category

The property that named the sneaker — quietness — is an unusual selling point for footwear, because it describes what the shoe does not do. Hard soled shoes announced the wearer; rubber soles did not. That single difference made canvas-and-rubber shoes suitable for settings where leather shoes were too formal and too noisy, and it gave the wearer freedom to move without being heard, which the definition itself offers as the likely reason for the name. Keds built its popularity on that simple construction plus a classic and stylish design, which is why fashion icons are named among its wearers alongside ordinary customers. A shoe that stays the same while fashions change can be rediscovered by each new generation as a classic, which is the pattern in the brand's fall in the 1990s and its later return.