A few months ago, I was in Tokyo looking for some vintage Chrome Hearts. I popped into a shop and found a pair of sneakers I'd never seen before. They were black, extremely chunky, and where the heel should've been, there was an enormous metal spring. They weren't in my size, which was annoying, and before I even got the chance to look at the logo, I was pulled away.
As soon as I got back to my hotel, I opened up Google and searched something along the lines of “sneakers with giant spring heel.” And, lo and behold: Z-Coil.
More specifically, the Z-Coil Freedom. Looking at them, I assumed I'd stumbled across some obscure Japanese sneaker or perhaps an old designer shoe that I'd somehow missed. The reality was better. Z-Coil is an orthopaedic footwear company from Albuquerque, New Mexico – and it's been making shoes like this since before I was born.
The story starts with Alvaro Z Gallegos, a runner who, in 1991, began experimenting with putting a spring underneath a shoe in an attempt to alleviate the pain that came with running. Eventually, that idea became Z-Coil, a family business built around a fairly straightforward proposition: if you put a big-ass shock-absorbing spring underneath someone's heel, walking might hurt a little less.
It sounds mad, right? But there's some logic to it. Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Obi Jude Nzeako tells GQ that Z-Coil's built-in arch support should help control excessive pronation (when your foot rolls too far inwards as you walk), although there's nothing particularly new about that. “The spring heel is, however, the genuinely unique element,” he says. Nzeako hasn't personally trialled Z-Coil, but says the theory makes sense: the spring should absorb energy as your heel hits the ground and return some of it as you move towards your toes, potentially reducing fatigue over longer periods of walking.
Z-Coil has spent decades selling that idea as a solution for people with sore feet. It has remained a family operation, and last September, members of the Gallegos clan even took it onto Shark Tank. But somewhere along the way, something strange happened – people who had absolutely no intention of buying an orthopaedic shoe started looking at Z-Coil and thinking it looked really good.
London-based model and menswear guy Pavel Davison first spotted a pair on a woman in Dalston a few years ago. “I didn't quite understand what I was looking at, but I liked it,” he tells us. In fact, he “genuinely thought they were some crazy unique designer piece.” Later, while looking at buying a pair of Balenciaga X-Panders, he rediscovered Z-Coil and disappeared down a rabbit hole researching the brand.
And finding out that they weren't some designer experiment only made Davison like them even more. He loved how functional the brand's website was, the fact that Z-Coil was still a small family-run operation, and, most importantly, that the freaky design had a genuine reason for existing. That, along with the little sub-community surrounding the shoe, made it feel “so much more authentic than other brands that are new to the scene.”
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Footwear designer Jess Dalton did basically the same thing. She found a pair on Depop and assumed they must've come from some retro footwear archive. “I'm someone who lives in a constant flow-state of research when it comes to footwear, so for something to catch me off guard is quite rare,” she tells GQ. After discovering what they actually were and why they existed, she became an “avid follower” of the brand.
So there's a pattern here. I found a pair in a Tokyo vintage shop and assumed I'd stumbled across some obscure fashion shoe. Davison thought they were designer. Dalton thought they were archival. In reality, we were all getting excited about an orthopaedic sneaker made by a family business in New Mexico. And maybe that's exactly why Z-Coil works.
Most sneaker tech is carefully integrated into a shoe. Foam gets sculpted into a midsole. Air units sit inside pretty little windows. Carbon plates are buried where you can't see them. Z-Coil sticks a massive steel spring on the outside. “The brand has rejected conventional norms by choosing to showcase the technology in its rawest form,” says Dalton. There's no attempt to camouflage the important bit with rubber or foam. The thing that makes Z-Coil function is also the thing that makes it look insane.
Dalton has a neat way of describing the result: “Z-Coil is so anti-fashion that it goes full circle and actually becomes something highly covetable.” It wasn't designed according to a trend forecast or created to look futuristic. “What makes it cool is that it never tried to follow trends,” she says. “It was designed to solve a problem and accidentally became a footwear masterpiece.”
Fashion has clocked this before. For autumn/winter 2018, Scottish designer Christopher Kane worked with Z-Coil and sent versions of its orthopaedic footwear down his London runway covered in crystals. At the time, Kane was already messing around with footwear that traditionally existed well outside fashion: a few seasons earlier, he'd famously started collaborating with Crocs.
But the Z-Coils turning up now don't need crystals stuck all over them or a designer name attached – the weird medical shoe itself is enough.
Then again, look at what guys are wearing now and maybe a trainer with a massive spring isn't quite as ridiculous as it sounds. Approach shoes (the hiking-y things you wear when you're “approaching” a mountain to climb) are now fashion shoes. People are wearing Vibram FiveFingers under their own free will. And lets not forget that Salomons and Hokas and other bits of serious outdoor footwear now spend plenty of their lives in pubs rather than on mountains. The stranger and more specialised a shoe once seemed, the less that appears to matter.
Self-described footwear person Karl Smith-Eloise calls some of this “functionality as performance”: the appeal of wearing something that looks like it's doing something, regardless of whether you're actually using it for that purpose. “I wore a pair of Norda 001s out today,” he tells us, “but I absolutely was not trail running.”
He doesn't think that means our idea of a good-looking shoe has undergone some enormous permanent transformation, though. “We go big, we go small, we go maximalist, we go minimalist,” he says. “The pendulum swings ad infinitum.” A few years ago, menswear was dominated by ultra-flat Sambas and Gazelles. Now, apparently, there's room for something that looks like it's been fitted with its own suspension.
Davison sees something else happening at the same time. On one side, guys are constantly searching for “new” silhouettes and designs that are “punchy-slash-ugly”. On the other, they're still buying classics, nostalgia, and the stuff that goes with everything. Z-Coil, strangely enough, manages to sit somewhere between the two. It's a genuinely odd-looking shoe that can still claim three decades of history.
Perhaps, then, Z-Coil hasn't suddenly become fashionable. Fashion has simply moved somewhere that Z-Coil, without really changing what it does, makes a lot more sense. Which brings us back to Tokyo.
Z-Coil isn't suddenly everywhere in Japan. Osaka-based content creator Rangga Kamimura, who first noticed the brand around three or four years ago, says it's still relatively niche. But he has noticed recognition growing among fashion enthusiasts, particularly online. And when you look at how Z-Coil is being worn there, finding a pair in a vintage shop starts to make a little more sense. “In Japanese fashion, rather than simply wearing famous brands, there's a strong emphasis on ‘how to incorporate something unique in your own way,’” Kamimura tells GQ. He points to Japan's long history of taking things that were created for function and completely recontextualising them. Military clothing and workwear weren't designed with fashion in mind either, but that didn't stop generations of Japanese designers and collectors from finding something interesting in them.
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Kamimura has particularly noticed Z-Coils being worn by people who are into vintage clothing. Against older pieces, that strange mechanical heel creates a deliberate contrast. He does something similar himself. “Even if I dress in a completely normal outfit, just wearing Z-Coil sneakers creates a sense of incongruity around my feet,” he says. “I like that ‘slightly strange’ feeling.” And “slightly strange” is probably the sweet spot. Z-Coil doesn't need to become the next Air Force 1 – and it probably won't. Part of the fun is that most people still don't know what the hell it is.
Davison reckons that 10 years ago menswear was “a bit too hung-up on brands” for most guys to give Z-Coil much of a chance. Even then, though, he suspects there were people who got it. “I can guarantee that the best dressed underground fashion guy you know probably had a pair.”
That's the funny thing about Z-Coil. Plenty of trainer brands spend millions trying to make a shoe look futuristic, technical, and slightly fucked up. It managed it by accident because a runner in New Mexico wanted his feet to hurt less.
A few months ago, I knew none of this. I just knew that I'd found a pair of very weird sneakers that I would've bought if they were two sizes bigger. Now I know exactly what they are. Which is useful, because next time I'm in Tokyo, I'm checking the size first.