Gray tape on shoes......I don't get it. (1 Viewer)

[Mitch Stevens]

I've been seeing a new trend lately. People who own black shoes, wrap gray tape around one of them. Why on earth would anyone do this? I don't get it at all!

Movies I have seen where this happens in, is:

Home Room
&
Dead Hate The Living

I've seen about 4 other movies in which a character who has black shoes, has gray tape around one of them, but the titles of the films escape me right now.

CAN ANYONE TELL ME WHY THIS IS DONE?

 

[Ricardo C]

No one's been able to explain capri pants yet, so I doubt your question will be answered before say... 2030 or so

 

[John Watson]

Hey, on the right girl, Capris look good!

Duct tape, on the other hand?

 

[Jay H]

Perhaps it is reflective or is it just dull grey tape?

Runners, cyclists use reflective stuff on parts that move, i.e. your feet, the bike wheels, it's really visible to the cagers out there. But if it's not reflective, I have no clue, maybe just protecting their $200 sneakers from wear and tear.

Jay

 

[ThomasC]

I use a little bit of duct tape on my shoes, but that's because they're two years old. I love 'em, but New Balance doesn't make them in my size anymore for some reason, so I'm going to stick with 'em for as long as I can. The shoes are white and some blue.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

Grey tape absorbs vibrations. So if you wrap your shoes in it, then the graboids can't get you!

 

[Richard Travale]

My friend used to use duct tape on his shoes. That was because he was too cheap to fork out the $15 to buy a new pair of Chuck Taylor's low tops. He wore those for at least 5 years all covered in duct tape.

 

[Andrej Dolenc]

I've used duct tape on my cycling shoes to keep my toes from freezing when riding in the wintertime.

Andrej

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Since everybody seems to have missed this (one shoe rules out the "reflection" theory, the fact that is it always one shoe and always black shoes makes the "repair" theory less likely) I thought I'd post the key line from your post with emphasis added.

As for your question: Presumably this is being shown in the movies because it is a real-world fad - probably in the L.A. area. As for why the fad exists... see above under "capri" pants. Maybe there is some real bad a** who fixed one of his shoes with duct tape and all the wannabees started copying him thinking it was some kind of fashion thing.

(Which reminds me of an old story: A woman always trims a couple of inches off the end of a roast before putting it in the pan and into the oven. When her husband asks her why, she can't - her mother had taught her to cook, and that's what her mother had always done. So she calls her mother and asks, "Mom, why do we trim the end off a roast before we put it in the pan?" The mother is surprised.

"You're still doing that? Sweetheart, the only reason I did that is because the old house had a very small oven and I had to use very small roasting pans. With all of you to send to college, your father and I never had the money to buy a new oven. But I haven't cut the ends off a roast since your little brother went off the college and we moved into the condo!")

Regards,

Joe

 

[Dave Poehlman]

Maybe their fans of the movie "Breaking Away" where they duct tape the kids feet to the pedals.

 

[Malcolm R]

As Joseph says, it's probably just some idiotic fashion fad, like when all the badass gangsta's walked around with one pants leg hitched up, just like LL Cool J.

:rolleyes

 

[John Thomas]

Hey, on the right girl, Capris look good!

You can remove "Capris" and put in any other form of clothing or some types of foods.

 

[David Lawson]

Or diamonds. (Possibly work-unfriendly, unless you have the magazine subscription at work.)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/full.html

No Photoshop work was involved, from what I hear. Sadly, none of the photo shoots I've attended have required me to paste diamonds on models.

 

[Mitch Stevens]

Yes, a lot of people missed where I said that only ONE shoe has the tape wrapped around it. Hasn't anyone else seen this, in the movies or TV shows they watch? I seen it in 6 movies and 1 TV show so far, but I can't remember which ones :frowning:

 

[John Spencer]

I'm assuming it's for the same reason the rapper Nelly wears a band-aid on his left cheek. It makes a person seem really unique, even though it's rather trivial.

 

[JasonWynia]

This is the kind of thing that starts out as something unintentional and gets picked up. A lot of fads start out this way. Look at faded and ripped jeans. Anyone who grew up on a farm had dozens of pairs of worn out, ripped jeans, worn out from work. When I was in high school I had a drawer full of worn, ripped jeans that my mother wouldn't let me wear to school. They all came from garage sales at less than $1 a pair. Yet, at the same time, people in LA were paying over $100 for ripped and torn jeans.

The duct tape started the same way. Duct tape is a great way to fix almost anything, including shoes. Someone probably saw someone who was legitimately wearing a pair that needed the tape to keep them together and figured it was done to be cool. The way this stuff starts is rarely logical.

 

[John Thomas]

It's gettin hot in herrr..