How Did Socks Become Fashion's Seasoning? | Market Inventors

Designers now rank socks with sunglasses as a small item with lethal impact — "they make runway looks less unattainable, without making trendsetters feel it's beneath them."

"If you're going to wear socks, you can forget about fashion entirely... Don't ask why, just don't wear them." That was what Valentino's two creative directors, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, told Ben Stiller when the star of Zoolander asked them how his character should dress.

That was 2001. Today socks are everywhere in fashion. At Gucci's 2018 Cruise show this past May, retro printed socks were the brightest thing on the runway — two years earlier, Gucci had no sock line at all. Thom Browne, the American designer who was the first to throw socks off the runway, brought them back for his 2016 fall/winter menswear show. And on the 2013 runways, supermodels for Prada, Burberry, LV, and Chanel all played with ankle socks and sandals, a combination British high-street shoppers had written off as hopelessly dowdy.

Beyond the runways of the major fashion weeks, you feel socks pushing forward in street-style shots and glossy fashion spreads too. So much so that designers now rank socks with sunglasses as a small item with lethal impact — "they make runway looks less unattainable, without making trendsetters feel it's beneath them."

Before the 20th century, socks were assumed to be something worn by schoolchildren and stodgy men. Now they are a fashion accessory taken seriously in its own right, and people have moved from "I have to put socks on" to "what kind of socks should I wear?"

Certain celebrities make the shift even easier to see. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, working the pedals during a piano performance, lets pink socks with hot-pink dots peek out from under his dark trouser cuffs; Zac Efron keeps getting caught by photographers in blue striped socks; PewDiePie, the YouTube megastar, simply made a video declaring his love of colorful socks...

But it wasn't the luxury houses that pushed socks to the front of fashion. The two brands seen as representative of this trend are sock companies: Happy Socks and Stance. The first is known for its playful, goofy style and took in 100 million euros last year; the second led the way in sports fashion, with revenue that had already reached $180 million (about 153 million euros) in 2015. For a sock brand, that means consumer loyalty to the brand itself, which used to be rare — you were more likely to buy socks because you liked Nike or Zara, not because you liked the socks.

And competitors with similar positioning keep appearing: Pantherella, the British brand known for fantastical patterns and colors; Corgi, the Welsh maker of bright striped socks; Bonne Maison, the French brand that tells stories through sock designs; Chup, the Japanese brand with a retro, folk-inspired look; and Almond Rocks, founded in Britain by the Chinese street graffiti artist SKA...

Trace the trend back and Nike probably led the way. In 2007 Nike launched an "Elite" sock collection, first worn by the US Olympic basketball team in its Blue-White scrimmage in Las Vegas. Its comfort and distinctive look spread the socks widely among NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) teams. The next year Nike's Elite socks began matching the exact team colors of the schools it sponsored, which is where the rainbow of socks now seen on courts comes from — a colorful line that once earned Nike $100 million a year.

In 2008 the phrase "crazy socks boom" was coined, and Google searches for the word "sock" hit an all-time high by the end of that year. That same year Happy Socks appeared in Sweden; a year later Stance was born in the United States.

Selling Socks the Way a Streetwear Label Would

"The idea Happy Socks' posters get across seems to be: screw the clothes, just give me the socks," Li Jiyan told QDaily. He runs operations for Yizi Store, a Taobao original-design brand in China whose line covers clothing, bags, and stationery; in 2011, when the brand was starting out, it designed a few brightly colored sock collections. As a consumer, Li's read is this: "Put the two of them in the same classroom, and Happy Socks is the troublemaker, the class clown, while Stance is the straight-A student."

The two brands' origin stories bear that out. Happy Socks, with its bright colors and odd patterns, came out of Scandinavia, a place famous for austere minimalism, and was founded by two atypical Scandinavians. The company began in an ordinary afternoon conversation: Mikael Söderlindh, after years at an ad agency, complained to his old friend Viktor Tell that his creative work was getting duller and duller. Tell, a full-time graphic designer and illustrator, thought for a moment and proposed they go into socks together.

The two young men set up the company within three weeks, designed a first batch of colorful socks, and found an old Turkish workshop with more than 30 years of hand-craft experience to make them, pricing each pair at around $10. The novelty of the positioning opened the market fast.

On design, Happy Socks runs wild. It regularly invites artists of every kind to collaborate, hands them a blank white sock template to do as they please with, and sends the finished drawing straight to the factory. Plenty of artists who aren't big names but have a strong personal style have been given the job — India's Manish Arora, for one, who has designed for Lady Gaga and Madonna.

So you can always find something unexpected at Happy Socks. Last year's Local Heroes collection brought together creative people from 15 countries, among them Iris Apfel, a goddess of New York fashion design, 96 this year, usually seen in oversized glasses, antique necklaces, and bangles; her collaboration socks mixed rabbit and sheep motifs with color-blocked stripes. Another classic is the line with the American streetwear label Billionaire Boys Club: diamonds, starry skies, dollar signs, and its classic helmet, all over riotously colored socks. Earlier there were socks with the American rap king Snoop Dogg, drawn from street graffiti culture, and a limited edition built on classic imagery from the hit game Minecraft, which sold out early. The newest seasonal collection pays tribute to the Beatles, the electronic-music maverick Steve Aoki, and the tattoo-world goddess Megan Massacre.

Doesn't all of this look exactly like how a streetwear label operates? The crossovers are both the product and a marketing weapon.

And Happy Socks' marketing never lets you catch your breath. Its goofy, absurdist style carries out founder Viktor Tell's motto to the letter: "All Play, No Work." In 2013 the American surrealist photographer David LaChapelle shot a set of images for the brand's fall/winter collection that the advertising world now treats as a classic. Male and female models posed nude except for playful polka-dot or striped socks, throwing exaggerated dance shapes; against the hard, saturated color compositions, the pictures hit hard and stayed funny.

That wasn't enough. LaChapelle also shot a horror short for Happy Socks, telling the story of a dancer in colorful socks in a strange visual key, full of nudity and blood. Even founder Viktor Tell said, "That really is the weirdest film I've ever seen." Just before Halloween in 2015, Robert Rodriguez, the director of Sin City, shot another horror short for the brand, SOCK'EM DEAD, soaked in a violent, bloody aesthetic. The collaboration socks used three drawing motifs the director loves, built around the short's vampire: his fangs and his drops and smears of blood turned into dots and droplets on a red-and-black ground.

SOCK'EM DEAD

Stance started from athletic socks instead, which follows from the fact that three of its five founders came out of sports fashion. Stance president John Wilson was previously president of the American sports brand Reef and US sales director for the travel and sports brand Oakley; marketing president Ryan Kingman was global general manager of the American skateboard company Element; creative director Aaron Hennings spent ten years at the Australian surf and leisure brand Billabong.

What made Stance's name was replacing Adidas as the NBA's official sock supplier in 2015, formally ending the black-and-white game sock and opening the era of the colorful one — and it won the right to print the NBA logo on its socks, a deal Adidas had failed to land for more than a decade. In 2016 it also replaced For Bare Feet as the sock supplier to Major League Baseball.

Credit for that goes largely to Stance's own 360 dyeing process, which drives the color deep into the fiber so patterns don't distort when the sock stretches, widening the range of designs it can make.

Endorsements from athletes hardened Stance's standing in sports further. Its first celebrity endorser was the NBA star Dwyane Wade. In 2013, riding the NBA All-Star Game, Stance launched its NBA Legends collection, printing several of the league's legendary players onto socks.

Close as it is to sport, Stance has never positioned itself as a sports brand; its many collaborations with musicians and street figures show it wants to be seen as a fashion brand.

On the current craze for retro fashion driven by sports brands working with celebrities, Stance got there in 2015, when it brought in Rihanna as creative director for a limited-edition line. This month it launched two more collections, drawing Rihanna's classic red-carpet looks from the big music awards and her outlandish music-video outfits onto socks. Before that, the golf legend Bubba Watson, the skateboarding myth Chris Cole, and the teenage pop star Willow Smith had all signed with Stance to promote it.

Offline, Stance works with established retailers like Nordstrom and with textile brands to open more stores and put out collaboration lines. It sold 36 million pairs of socks in 2015 and now has more than a million followers on Instagram. Happy Socks has fewer Instagram followers than Stance, but that hasn't stopped fashion-world influencers from promoting it, because long before Instagram existed Happy Socks was making content for fashion bloggers, doing commercial deals with them, and lending out its showroom at key moments — all of which earned it a good name.

The Years Colorful Socks Caught On Were the Years Men's Fashion Did Too

According to data from the market research firm NPD, in 2013 men's global spending on fashion passed women's for the first time in more than a decade. Men's spending on clothes rose 5% year over year to $60.8 billion, and their spending on socks grew by double digits.

The study also found the cost of dressing a man's ankles going up: a pair of socks averaged $1.76 in 2011 and $2.18 by 2013.

Most of the people socks have won over are precisely the male consumers who look fairly cold toward "pretty things." Of Happy Socks' 100 million euros in annual sales, only 30% comes from women's socks. SKA told QDaily that men are the main buyers of Almond Rocks too, and that when women buy the socks they are often buying them for a boyfriend. Almond Rocks is a colorful-sock brand founded in 2010, inspired by Paul Smith.

Well-made, design-driven socks have become men's fashion's "new secret weapon." For men whose style stays steady and mostly plain, socks do an outsized amount of work as the finishing touch. Compared with women, men have less room and fewer options for expressing themselves through clothes in the first place.

An unexpected change shows up in the hit sneakers all over the street. According to NPD Group data, the US footwear market sold $26.2 billion of men's shoes and $29.9 billion of women's in 2016, a gap of $3.7 billion — three years earlier it was $8 billion. Even if pragmatic men are spending that money on a single pair of sneakers, it is enough to show that the fashion gap between men and women, at the feet at least, is closing.

The accessories editor at British Elle said of this that we now all wear more or less the same sneakers — Stan Smiths, Yeezys, Converse, Vans, Nike — and there may be nothing better than a good pair of socks for expressing a mood.

Happy Socks founder Mikael Söderlindh has said the same in interviews: "It's a form of self-expression, a mood." "You wake up in the morning, stare at the drawer and ask yourself, 'Am I red today? Blue? Or polka dot?' It's a small moment, but a genuinely happy one."

How easily they go with sneakers may be one more reason athletic socks keep growing as a niche. The American streetwear label Off-White and the Russian brand Gosha Rubchinskiy have both started designing socks of their own, aimed squarely at the athletic kind. Bombas, another New York sock company, spotted the same opening: founded in 2014, it sold more than $150,000 of design-driven athletic socks in its first 30 days, took in $1.8 million in its first year, and expects $50 million in sales this year.

There is another explanation as well: socks cost relatively little, so the guilt of buying them is lighter. If you can't bring yourself to pay £500 for a Vetements hoodie, buying a £50 pair of socks now and then is acceptable, isn't it? That appeals to men who only want to swap out a small item occasionally to freshen things up.

"Fashion's representative in politics" — Justin Trudeau, the Canada Goose-wearing Canadian prime minister, likes to have a bit of fun with his socks, and the press has nicknamed it "sock diplomacy." In political and diplomatic settings, men have very little room to work with in what they wear, and changing ties is no longer surprising, so socks turn out to be a decent option.

This past May in Montreal, Trudeau wore Star Wars socks to a meeting with Enda Kenny, then the Irish prime minister, because it happened to be Star Wars Day. That same month, at a NATO meeting in Brussels, he wore one blue sock and one pink one, each printed with the NATO flag on one side.

And at Toronto's gay pride parade in June he switched to socks printed with "Eid Mubarak," marking the Islamic festival that ends Ramadan, which fell on the day of the parade. That amounted to an enormous advertisement for the maker of those Eid socks, Halal Socks, a Toronto company founded only this year. Its website currently shows just seven styles, all from its colorful line.

More and more players are entering the sock business. Euromonitor International puts the global sock market at $52.683 billion in 2016, up 3% year over year. According to a report by The Business of Fashion, a buyer at the British luxury e-commerce platform MatchesFashion.com said sock sales on the site have grown by four digits over the past two years.

Marking Out Customers by "Style," but Always Insisting on Fun

One interesting thing to come out of our interviews and various press reports is how vague everyone's answers are about who exactly their customers are; what they stress instead is the style they have set for themselves. Almond Rocks wants to attract smart, stylish people. Yizi Store doesn't sell many socks, but the socks keep the same relaxed, witty, quietly cheeky, absurd-yet-blunt positioning as everything else it makes. "Teenagers, hipsters, fashion followers, business people... anyone who likes fun, colorful designs," is how Happy Socks founder Mikael Söderlindh once described the brand's target customers.

Whatever else, "fun" is the crucial point, and it is what the consumers we interviewed brought up most. That hard-to-pin-down quality, put onto socks, turns into jumpy, exaggerated color and bold, novel patterns, and consumers who like good-looking things are easily caught. "My everyday style leans minimalist, so pairing it with colorful socks sometimes keeps the whole outfit from being too plain," says Iyra, who works in Beijing. She does marketing for a high-end art mall; in her twenties, Iyra, like many young people, prefers a minimalist look and is devoted to Scandinavian design — she cares more about whether a design has something striking in it than about the brand. Leng Yan, a DJ in Shenzhen, is likewise partial to black, white, and gray clothes. He is 40 this year and has a small following for his illustrated planner journals, in which his cartoon characters come in a riot of colors and are extremely cute. Colorful socks, he says, add a splash of brightness to his usually muted wardrobe.

The imaginative work on socks can also be read as a display of a loud, rebellious personality — a performance, like DJing, rap, street dance, graffiti, skateboarding, or street basketball. SKA's idea was to take the street graffiti he was already good at and move it, in a different form, onto another canvas: socks. But Almond Rocks' patterns aren't as unrestrained as graffiti; they keep more of a British sense of humor.

Its early sales were unremarkable, though. SKA says they put a lot of effort into bringing overseas styling ideas into China, collecting street-style photos of socks to show consumers, hoping more people would get the small jokes behind the designs. Later, teaming up with Chen He, a variety-show star from Running Man, lifted the brand's profile; the collaboration pair was printed with his catchphrase, "genius." Annual sales now run to a few million yuan.

Socks got into the sightlines of fashion people worldwide largely thanks to the people with real say over what spreads. Plenty of fashion bloggers on Weibo pose and post in all kinds of design-driven socks, some of them leaving Taobao links in the comments and walking their followers through how to wear them. Odd Maker, a homegrown Taobao design brand, began releasing colorful socks this past June; its designer told QDaily that a few friends of his in fashion are promoting the brand, and the socks currently sell about 200 orders a month.

He Xuan has lived in Sweden for nearly three years and works as a data analyst at General Electric. He first heard of Happy Socks from a few articles about Swedish fashion brands on WeChat official accounts. He worried at first that socks with so much color would look "too showy," but then noticed that it wasn't only fashion bloggers recommending them — plenty of people around him, including some of the more fashionable middle-aged men in his office, were wearing them, and his doubts went away. "The design really is distinctive, easy to recognize, and it doesn't go too far."

Walking out of the house in bright socks is now, for many people, a way of their own to express personality and identity.

Changes in Office Fashion Have Opened a Bigger Market for Socks

Last year The New York Times published a piece titled "The End of the Office Dress Code." Near the end it says: "We have entered an age in which expressing your own personality outranks presenting a professional image — a shift of power, and one that has already begun."

This past July, Goldman Sachs announced it was loosening the dress code for its computer engineers in order to attract good technical talent. In the two years before that, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and other financial institutions had also begun letting employees dress casually.

Entrepreneurs and programmers in Silicon Valley now treat colorful socks as a clever way to liven up a dull daily outfit. Some men even go hunting through women's socks for striking designs, and if they come in XXL, they take them home.

Changing workplace dress will also open a natural platform for socks inside the office, where word of mouth between coworkers can fold colorful socks into workplace fashion faster. Of the Almond Rocks orders SKA has counted, 40% were shipped to office buildings.

Until now, T-shirts and jeans have been the standard-bearers of casual office culture. But a T-shirt may have less room to work in an office than a sock does: a pair of colorful socks is far more discreet than a T-shirt with a skull on it. An office worker who changes into a special pair of socks after work, before heading to a party, can shift the feel of the whole outfit — and the switch is simple and direct.

Then again, if you know how the T-shirt became a fashion item, you will see something similar in how socks are entering fashion now.

Before the 1940s, T-shirts of all kinds were worn as underwear, until the 1934 film It Happened One Night all but wrecked the T-shirt industry. Clark Gable's character showed his body with no undershirt (a T-shirt) on, hinting at his untamed masculinity, and all at once the T-shirt became shorthand for stodgy, health-obsessed dressing.

Just when you'd think the T-shirt was about to vanish, millions of American men went to fight World War II and won it wearing T-shirts. That made the shirt a symbol of manhood. The Wild One, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Rebel Without a Cause then shaped it into the badge of the bad boy, carrying a message of teenage discontent. Campaign shirts, band shirts, slogan shirts began appearing one after another, and printed T-shirts were used to declare support for celebrities, politicians, and brands.

Since then, enthusiasm for putting things on T-shirts has barely cooled. SKA thinks socks work even better than T-shirts as a space to show something. These two trend items, which followed strikingly similar paths, were both thrown out of fashion and both came back, taken up by young people as vehicles for subculture and for unorthodox opinions.

As people's love of colorful socks keeps growing, capital is flowing in. Over the past three years, Happy Socks' sales and EBITDA have both grown more than 50% a year. Early this year the European private equity firm Palamon Capital Partners announced it was buying a majority stake in Happy Socks, valuing the company at more than $80 million; Palamon also plans to put in $4.86 million of growth funding. Stance raised $30 million in April 2016, bringing its total funding past $116 million.

The big brands' socks sell well too. Last year Adidas sold 538 million euros ($632 million) of socks, and H&M sold 357 million euros ($420 million).

Sock brands' styles and categories will keep splitting into finer segments; that much is easy to foresee. Happy Socks has announced Hysteria, a sub-brand for women, launching this fall — the next growth point for a brand that is almost 10 years old.

The mid- and knee-length wool socks common today are about to be joined by more seasonal, inventive pieces: the fishnet socks and tights now in fashion, in rayon, printed nylon, mercerized cotton, and other materials, which can be either riotously colorful or barely there.

Socks have become a fairly serious business. You have to admit it: nobody dares look down on them anymore.

(Iyra, Leng Yan, and He Xuan are pseudonyms, at the interviewees' request.)

Images in this article, including the cover image, come from Happy Socks, Stance, and other companies.