What Are HeyDude Shoes—and Why Are People So Mad at Them?

“If you’re talking to a dude and he’s wearing any of these things,” the stylist and musician Gabriel Mor posted to TikTok this past December, “that’s a runner.” (As in: Run! Fast!) First up on his list: HeyDude shoes, which Mor called “egregious” and compared to a Kleenex box.

“I have never seen a pair of HeyDudes that actually look like they fit,” Mor, 35, explained to me from his home in Oklahoma City last week. In short: They look too big on the foot, he says, the open-laced design makes the wearer look like a surly child, and the shape—the flat, rounded-toe box—is unwieldy. “They aren’t that comfortable, which seems to be everyone’s justification when you ask about why they wear them,” he added. “And at $65, they aren’t that cheap either.” Mor has even tried a pair on himself and found them chunky to look at and too loose to be practical.

He’s not alone. Spend any good amount of time on TikTok (which I do, for better or worse) and you might have been sucked into the lively, divisive discourse around HeyDude shoes. There are certainly plenty of strong negative opinions about them—another poster called them the “greatest threat to a relationship or marriage,” for example—but they have plenty of fans too. “I know y’all ain’t talking shit about HeyDudes,” posted Trystan Fossett, rightfully calling out the fact that those who say they forgo style for comfort will gladly don a pair of the equally clunky Ugg Tasman slipper. “You’d be better off stuffing your feet in two loaves of Sunbeam bread!” Meanwhile there’s a small universe of haul videos, GRWMs, and people showing their extensive HeyDude collections online, demonstrating the unexpected spell these shoes have cast over some. Like everything else these days, HeyDude could be interpreted as a symbol of the ever-widening combative divide that afflicts all things, from politics to comfy slip-ons.

For the uninitiated, HeyDude is a footwear brand founded in 2008 in Italy by entrepreneur Alessandro Rosano. Despite sharing a country of origin with the likes of Tod’s and Gucci, it’s a company ruthlessly dedicated to matters of comfort over style. They’re best known for the friendly sounding Wally, made from a breathable fabric upper, foam insert, and a flexible outsole that, if folded in half, will spring back to its original shape; some can even be tossed in the washing machine. As Mor noted, it has an “open” lace design, in which the laces are, in essence, decorative, made to remain untied. This allows wearers to slip their feet in and out with ease, one of the shoe’s biggest selling points. Its warm weather cousin, the Wally Free, meanwhile, comes equipped with open lattice outsoles so, when the interior foam inlay is removed, they become ventilated, a breathable option for summer. Generally the shoes range in price from around $50 to $80, however with sales, you can sometimes find them for around half of that price. Additionally there are mid-top and mule options, as well as sneakers and flip flops.

Not that they’re completely divorced from matters of aesthetics: A quick scan of their current assortment shows that, in addition to more subdued models, there are pairs decorated in American flag stars-and-stripes, camouflage, palm trees, and fish, while fabrics range from linen to denim. Meanwhile, there’s an entire category dedicated to the colors and codes of different colleges—U of Miami, Texas A&M, Alabama, and UNC, among them.