Word: footwear
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Once the standard footwear of almost all self-respecting hoopsters, the All Star nowadays is less an athletic shoe than a fashion accessory. Teenage boys and girls practically live in them. Woody Allen has been known to wear the red version of the high-tops with formal wear. They have become an international icon as well; half the 10 million pairs of All Stars sold last year were exported. The All Star is the most popular sneaker in Japan, where Converse sold more than 1 million pairs last year. In France they are known as "Chuckie...
...secret of the success of the Nike corporation, which began to make its famous footwear in 1971 and grew from an unknown also-ran in the shoe business to the universally familiar $3 billion institution of today, is that it understood that sneakers embodied the values of the people who wore them. / Americans wanted a well-made, high-tech athletic shoe not because it was a necessity but because the consciousness of the country had changed. "Jogging," "getting in shape," "working out" were part of the new life-style (another '70s concept), and Nike gave customers a stylish shoe...
...second big push toward Moscow, the Germans were already suffering their first severe cases of frostbite. Soviet General (later Marshal) Georgi Zhukov reportedly noted that the enemy was perhaps too efficient: its soldiers had been supplied with the correct size boots. Russians, he said, knew enough to wear oversize footwear -- the better to stuff with wool and straw to protect toes against the cold. A popular Russian caricature of the time had the Fritzes -- as German soldiers were less than affectionately called -- wrapped in anything they could grab out of occupied civilian homes -- including women's shawls and feather boas...
...WEIRD FOOTWEAR...
Last summer's fashionable footwear was the hiking sandal, cute but not much good on rocky slopes. Now women are wobbling around again on those high- altitude platform shoes. Here comes a boom in orthopedic practice...