“Even though I had a lot of trouble getting [the clogs] into shops before we were carrying it, now they all carry them. I’m a little bit ‘shake my head’ about it, but it’s fine,” says Salter, whose business is the largest Plasticana importer in the States. “I want to take a little bit of credit that I think we helped to frame them as something that wasn’t just a pure granola product.”
“Often when you have tourists or people whose parents are [visiting the city] and they see them in the store, they just identify them as ugly,” he adds. To some, of course, this adds to their appeal. For fashion people, or those who are “maybe a little more forward-thinking, they’re interested in the look of them.”
The unisex clogs tick most boxes on the post-pandemic style checklist: practical, comfortable, utilitarian, like Birks or Crocs. But the clogs are polarizing because they’re weird looking. First off, they are made of mottled brown rubber; while the manufacturer does make them in another color, a deep bottle green called “Vert,” Salter says the additional dye makes the material less sustainable and so Salter House chooses not to carry them. “So often with sustainable materials,” he says, “you have some messy evidence of the earth that it came from…whether it’s seeded bread or it’s a flax linen.” As a result, the clogs are a bit inconsistent—the sizing can be wonky, and the taupe color, created from the melting of the hemp’s sugar molecules, varies from pair to pair—so they still feel homespun.
The mule shape can still be a tough sell, but on TikTok, the challenge of styling “the most hated-on clogs” (or the potato-looking shoes that “the fashion boys are eating up lately”) draws curious viewers in. It’s a similar ethos that buoyed the broader ugly shoe of the last seven years or so: they’re comfortable, but on the right wearer, they also signal discerning taste.
After they appeared on the Bode runway, GQ’s own commerce writer Gerald Ortiz recommended the Plasticanas back in 2021, once he’d trekked over an hour from Ridgewood, Queens to Brooklyn Heights to purchase a pair at Salter House. The store still had limited sizing and stock back then. “I had seen that they would get a restock and sell out really fast, which made me want them even more,” Ortiz says. He liked the low-cut shape as a sleeker alternative to his Birkenstock Bostons.
After his endorsement, Ortiz recalls “at least 17 people” reaching out to him about them. There were more high-brow write-ups, too, in places like New York Magazine and the Financial Times. Now, he sees them around all time—which, in turn, means he wears his own Gardanas less frequently these days. “I am one of those fickle guys that is like if I see something enough, I will not want to wear it anymore,” he admits. “I still think it’s a really handsome shoe, honestly.”
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