A few weeks ago, a pitch landed in my inbox about the footwear brand Reef. Founded in 1984 by two surf-loving Argentinian brothers, the San Diego-based company has built its name as a popular footwear choice among the beach bums of Southern California, growing its initial $4,000 investment to a $187.7 million valuation when VF Corporation acquired it in 2005 (it was later sold to the Rockport Group in 2018 for an undisclosed amount). The reason for the pitch? It’s Fanning style—with a bottle opener embedded into the sole—was turning 21 (drinking age, get it?).
At the time, I didn’t think much of it. As a native Southern Californian, Reef feels aligned more with frat boys or chill dads than anything else. Sure, the brand is popular in certain circles, sporty, and an undisputed go-to for a certain type of comfort-oriented customer. But was it fashion-y? Stylish? Unclear.
Cut to last week, when I noticed the latest seasonal footwear offerings from The Row started trickling in: bohemian woven slippers, pilgrim-y loafers, sleek slides. One style, in particular, stood out to me—the Dan sandal, a flip-flop featuring thick, calfskin suede foot straps in tobacco brown with subtle topstitching. My synapses started firing. Didst my eyes deceive me? Was this flip-flop, which clocks in at just shy of $1,100, giving Big Reef Energy?
I did a gut check and showed a picture of the Dan to a gathering of my dear colleagues, and they confirmed my suspicion: this style did, in fact, have a distinctly Reef-ian energy. Specifically, a gentle callback to their best-selling Ojai Classic. It is, in many ways, the brother to The Row’s women’s style, the Beach Sandal.
Now my initial instinct was to balk at this design. Compared to last summer’s elegantly streamlined, unassumingly erotic Dune and City flip-flops, these felt bulky, cumbersome, bro-coded. They are the boy kibble to the Dune’s girl dinner.
But I took a breath and reminded myself that I implicitly trust the magical fashion savants Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to know what will be cool—what will be desirable—well before the rest of us. It’s their job! I mean, in the lead-up to last summer no one was buzzing about flip-flops, and then the Dune dropped, and their implicit endorsement instantly catapulted the style to Shoe of the Summer status, seemingly overnight (despite—or because of?—the hefty price tag).
So if they are intuiting that this season, our feet will crave a silhouette that has more heft, more substance, more presence, who am I to say they are wrong? This is a shoe that does not delicately tiptoe, but proudly strides. And, it should be noted, it’s not like Reef invented or singularly popularized a wider strap. Plenty of brands—like Rainbow, for instance—have similar styles.
Indeed, the Olsens have a preternatural understanding of what, exactly, we didn’t yet know we wanted. And here, they aren’t inventing, but shrewdly iterating: a thicker, heartier strap is enough to build upon the trend they created, imparting on it a little juice for us to reconsider it anew. That they’re leaning into this slightly dopey surfer vibe makes sense—the Olsens are California girls at heart. Possibly, it speaks to a certain nostalgia they may feel—perhaps of the potent Y2K mall brand era that has charmed certain corners of the Internet. Paired with some baggy cargo shorts, suddenly it looks less frat house and more like an idealized Bruce Weber-Abercrombie ad version of a frat house—two related but distinctly different things.
