The quest to create a perfectly-engineered sneaker started with the Converse All-Star. Resembling the thin-soled Chuck Taylors that are popular today, these were created with professional basketball players in mind. Years later, the University of Oregon’s track coach Bill Bowerman developed a method of pouring rubber onto a waffle iron in order to create light-as-air racing shoes that wouldn’t slow down his runners. Shortly thereafter, he founded Nike.

Since Bowerman’s use of the waffle iron to create shoe soles, medium selection has only become more innovative. Sneakers are designed with infinitesimal differences in support structure, cushioning, and total shoe weight in order to best fit their user’s needs. Some are made of sweat-wicking, breathable fabrics and others, like the Nike Flyknit, function as shoes and socks simultaneously.

With advances in engineering and computer programming, we’ve been able to design sneakers that better protect our bodies and function as incredibly powerful tools for healthy living.

Not to mention, technological advances have allowed us to create sneakers straight out of a science-fiction movie…literally. Just last week, Michael J. Fox of “Back to the Future” fame tried on the world’s first pair of self-lacing sneakers, and the implications of this innovation are immensely exciting. These shoes are engineered to make it easier for people with disabilities like cerebral palsy to dress themselves without aid.

Though trends these days may be more conceptual than they were last century, our Fashion-by-the-Decade name game need not end. If the twenty-teens are the decade in which we render painful heels obsolete and make awesome fashion less ableist, I’m excited to see what the 2020s will bring.

Lily K. Calcagnini, ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.