A 1993 Playlist For 2021 Doc Martens
New pair, meet old pair’s favorite jams!
Back in the early 90s in California, it was much, much harder to get your hands on a pair of cherry red Doc Martens. My dream shoe required overseas shipping until a few years later, when Nordstrom decided to pick up the British trend and offer them up to anyone with that kind of cash flow.
How did I ever finally land a pair? Not via the frenemy who handed me an empty box filled with a couple of pebbles in a sad attempt to trick me into thinking I’d have the boots at last.
Perhaps a birthday/Hannukah/4.0 GPA cluster led my parents to finally give in to my wishes, because my freshman year in high school was marked by wearing those perfect stompers with gauzy dresses and nubby grey cardigans or bell-bottom Gap jeans and baby tees. I wore them into the ground, and was pained to release them into the wild once we had outgrown one another.
This year — 2021 — it was time to get a new pair: jet black through and through, including the signature topstitching. What a trip to imagine how I would’ve felt in 1993 to so easily click the PayPal Buy Now button instead of wasting away in longing for months on end!
There are many moments when I think of my younger self being pissed as hell that I’m not more successful — where’s your published book? your…
