Birkenstock’s New Book – the 250-Year History of a Global Brand
Birkenstock has celebrated its 250th birthday by releasing a book that encompasses the company’s rich history, from its foundation by cobbler Johannes Birkenstock 1774 to global domination in 2024.
Image: Cover of Birkenstock’s New Book: Birkenstock: The Evolution of a Universal Purpose and Zeitgeist Brand (2024), edited by Dr Andrea H. Schneider-Braunberger.
The book, Birkenstock: The Evolution of a Universal Purpose and Zeitgeist Brand, is a project more than seven years in the making, with 15 internationally-recognised historians from around the world contributing to this history of the Birkenstock company and the global impact of its iconic footwear.
Birkenstock charts how the Birkenstock family’s continuation in the shoe business in the 18th and 19th centuries was due to hard work and twists of fate, and details how the company’s rise to international domination kicked off in 1902, when Konrad Birkenstock developed the first iterations of the now famous footbed.
The current iterations of Birkenstocks are traced to the mid-1950s. These were designed by Konrad’s grandson, Karl, who was influenced by mid-century Swiss design manifestos and the ethos of new brutalism. The result was the creation of simple, honest, functional, orthopaedic shoes that were fit for purpose and centred the wearer.
But by the late-1960s Birkenstocks were not just health shoes; they had become synonymous worldwide with American counterculture and, when worn with socks, with uncool, earnest German tourists. Nonetheless, Birkenstocks moved into the realm of fashion in the 1980s and are now highly desirable, fashionable footwear that are still extremely comfortable.
The project’s historians were given unfettered access to the Birkenstock Group company archive, which has been maintained since 2016 by Simon Kahles and is now curated by the book’s editor and managing director of the German Society for Business History, Dr Andrea Schneider-Braunberger. In turn, the project’s historians augmented Birkenstock’s archives by contributing additional materials from their research findings.
I contributed two chapters to the book, each of which spanned a 30-year history of the shoe: “Birkenstock in Australia 1992 to 2022: A Stable Shoe for Shifting Terrains in Australia”; and “From Hilarious Hippies to Hair-Raising Horror and High Fashion: 30 Years of Birkenstocks in Film”.
The history of Birkenstock in Australia is a queer history and there is strong evidence in contemporary culture of a specific relationship between sexual identity and shoes. From the shoes’ first retail appearance in Australia in 1992, Birkenstocks were part of the so-called ‘lesbian clone style’, which was characterized as comfortable and allowed lesbians nationally and globally to identify one another in solidarity.
I found strong, photographic evidence of this relationship between Australian lesbians and their Birkenstocks in the City of Sydney Archives. These images showed lesbian activists wearing Birkenstocks at the world-famous Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parades and Fair Days and other lesbian feminist demonstrations and events in Sydney over the past 30 years.
The LGBTQ+ community’s decades of activism has resulted in their acceptance in Australian society and my chapter illustrates how Birkenstocks have travelled with them on this journey.
My history of Birkenstocks in film demonstrates that the endurance of the shoe in movie costuming in multiple genres over 30 years is tied to the hippies’ powerful legacy and influence on the world. From their arrival in California in 1966, Birkenstocks quickly became the footwear of choice for hippies. This association became firmly entrenched in popular culture over the next decade, particularly the two-strap Birkenstock Arizona model that was released in 1973.
As such, Birkenstocks have long been used as a visual shorthand in film costuming to great comic effect and/or to signal that the wearer lives outside of the mainstream. And now, with the rise of Birkenstocks as highly fashionable footwear, Hollywood costumer designers are also using the shoes to signal a character’s fashionability, such as Margot Robbie’s Barbie in the 2023 eponymously named film.
Yet the story of Birkenstock is not finished and the design, stories, and social, cultural and economic impacts of Birkenstocks on the world are constantly changing and growing. Shoes have an enormous influence on how we move in the world and how we express our identities and while the Birkenstock: The Evolution of a Universal Purpose and Zeitgeist Brand has highlighted many of our stories, there are countless more waiting to be told.
