Sometimes, as a reporter, you have to admit that you bet on the wrong horse. This is one of those times.
A couple years ago, I was among the first people to write about snoafers. Snoafers, if you’re new to the term (or simply forgot), are mutant mash-ups of an athletic sneaker and a loafer. New Balance ignited the snoafer discourse when it teased its 1906L model, a slip-on with the soul of an ’80s running shoe, during a runway show by the Japanese designer Junya Watanabe. The shoes were as indelible as they were odd. Many people found them straight up ugly.
Soon came a crush of articles speculating on the Frankenshoe’s appeal. (I wrote not one, but two such pieces.) The industry responded to the buzz, as snoafer siblings arrived at Puma, Hoka, Nike and Converse. Aldo and Skechers even plunked their own snoafer clones onto the market.
But, looking back, sneaker loafers feel like a trend that never really came to pass. I just traveled through Milan, Paris and back to New York for various fashion weeks. Not once do I remember seeing a pair of snoafers. People may have wanted to read about the shoes. Wearing them was another matter.
“I don’t wear them as often as any of my other sneakers, to be honest,” said Eric Cho, 30, of Toronto. When he first saw images of the “unique, crazy” 1906L online, he thought, “I just need to have these.”
But once he bought them, he couldn’t crack how to wear them. “They’re in this gray area where they’re not formal enough to rock as a regular loafer, but also not super-casual,” he said. He had sneakers. And he had loafers. Turns out, he didn’t need a shoe that tried to be both.
Others concluded that by the time snoafers came to market, they had already been so visible online that people were sick of seeing them. There was, after all, a several month gap between the time the 1906L was first seen on the Paris runway and when New Balance started selling its mainline version. A buyer for a boutique summed up things when he told me that the 1906L was the first shoe he could remember whose hype peaked and fizzled before it even hit stores. New Balance did not comment for this article.
“It was a fun thing to talk about,” said Brendan Dunne, a footwear industry analyst who is now an executive at the resale platform StockX. He categorized the snoafer as a meme shoe, something poised for virality more than sales. (MSCHF’s Big Red Boot remains the gold standard of meme shoes. That these cartoony hooves now resell well below their original retail price of $350 captures the fate of most meme shoes.)
In Mr. Dunne’s assessment, the snoafer’s overvisibility online spurred us to overestimate the popularity of the shoes in the real world.
“It being such a funky shoe maybe enlarged what people felt it was going to be,” he said. In October, the average resale price for all models of New Balance’s 1906L on StockX was $186. Today, it is $174. The resale price for the shoe in gray (StockX’s best-selling model of snoafer) is now about seven percent less than its $150 resale price.
“It wasn’t an extended trend,” Mr. Dunne said. He, too, owned a pair. He wore them once to a wedding but rarely after that. “I don’t find that many occasions to wear them,” he said.
Even fans of the shoe profess that life is lonely on snoafer island. “I’ve never seen anyone else wear them,” said Jay Lin, 31, of San Francisco. He owns three pairs of sneaker loafers: the 1906L, the tasseled Hoka Speed Loafer and Mizuno Prophecy Moc with a springy latticed sole.
“They’re just something that I can slip on and head out the door,” he said, noting that they’ve replaced his Birkenstocks as a “nice, fashionable slipper.” Still, he said, he wears them less than he imagined he would.
Daniel Sebetich, 27, of Las Vegas similarly owns three pairs of snoafers, all from New Balance. He admitted that they’re really not as comfortable as other New Balances. “I’ve had blisters on the back of my foot wearing them for a long period of time,” he said. He has suffered through and likes them.
Others though? Not so much. “I have never seen anybody put these on their feet — like, other than me.”
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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