A cultural history of trainers, tracing the footprint of one of our most iconic fashions across sports activities, business, pop lifestyle, and American identity

When the athletic boot graduated from your beach locations and croquet courts of the wealthy elite to streetwear ubiquity, its journey through the heart of American life was just getting started. In this rollicking narrative, Nicholas K. Smith bears us through the long twentieth century as sneakers became the totem of subcultures from California skateboarders to NY rappers, the reason for gang violence and riots, the heart of a worldwide financial controversy, the lynchpin within a quest to turn big sports into big business, and the muse of high style. Studded with larger-than-life mavericks and unforeseen visionaries-from genius plastic inventor, Charles Goodyear, to road-warrior huckster Chuck Taylor, to the feuding brothers who founded Adidas and Puma, to the monitor coach who transformed the activity by pouring rubber in his wife’s waffle iron-Kicks presents us to the sneaker’s surprisingly influential, enduring, and evolving legacy.