How a Freaky French Gardening Clog Took Over Brooklyn (and Menswear TikTok)

Photographs: Salter House, Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

If you’re keeping an eye out for them, they’re easy to spot—especially once the days start to get longer. The Plasticana Gardana clog isn’t exactly a slam-dunk choice for warm-weather footwear, given its nonporous vinyl rubber composition. But there is something about the clog’s essence—it being a French gardening shoe constructed from hemp-derived material—that feels innately springy. After all, they are brown and speckled like a farm-raised chicken’s egg.

The translucent clog is a low-profile, unisex slip-on freckled with natural fibers and lined with a thin, soft netting, whose silhouette leans slightly more ballet flat than Croc. In New York City at least, the Plasticana Gardana clogs are abundant—rain or shine, with or without socks—around well-off neighborhoods in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, paired with neat work pants, tasteful sweats, or trendy high-water chinos. (On TikTok, they’ve been referred to as “the ‘I live in Brooklyn’ shoes.”) After stepping outside on a recent spring day, my editor Yang-Yi Goh reported back: “The Plasticanas are Plasticaning today.”

They are the foam-molded clog’s provincial cousin; an answer to the Park Slope mom’s No. 6 clog for the creative-director set. If HeyDudes are country, then Plasticanas are countryside.

A great deal of local wearers likely purchased their pairs at Salter House, a Brooklyn Heights boutique known for its “cottagecore” goods and lovely homewares. (Elsewhere in the store, you can find white cotton nightgowns, pewter serving platters, and natural beeswax candles.) In a historic neighborhood that’s home to the borough’s priciest real estate, the Gardanas, at $62 a pop, are a relatively affordable shoe for hanging around.

“We’ve got chefs from local restaurants that come in a lot, we’ve got the dog walkers, we’ve got the people who want to go upstate and need something that’s a no-brainer to throw on,” says Salter House co-owner Carson Salter, who first encountered the Plasticana style at the Maison & Objet design trade show in Paris in 2013, where he thought they looked “looked perfectly casual and cool.” This was pre-Salter House, so he didn’t yet have any way of ordering them wholesale. He pitched them to several retailers like Westerlind and Assembly New York but “nobody bit.” Once he and his wife Sandeep opened their own store in 2018, they started importing them.

A couple years later, Salter’s old schoolmate from growing up in Atlanta, Emily Adams Bode Aujla, sent the clogs down her Fall 2020 runway show, which put them on the radar of New York’s fashion crowd. They’ve since become a word-of-mouth hit, in addition to similar Plasticana models: a Wellies-style rainboot, a backless mule, and a nostalgic jelly sandal. Nowadays, other local boutiques such as Drake’s, Pilgrim Surf Supply, and Mohawk General Store stock them, as do a range of e-retailers including Gardenheir and Anthopologie.

“Even though I had a lot of trouble getting [the clogs] into shops before we were carrying it, now they all carry them. I’m a little bit ‘shake my head’ about it, but it’s fine,” says Salter, whose business is the largest Plasticana importer in the States. “I want to take a little bit of credit that I think we helped to frame them as something that wasn’t just a pure granola product.”

“Often when you have tourists or people whose parents are [visiting the city] and they see them in the store, they just identify them as ugly,” he adds. To some, of course, this adds to their appeal. For fashion people, or those who are “maybe a little more forward-thinking, they’re interested in the look of them.”

The unisex clogs tick most boxes on the post-pandemic style checklist: practical, comfortable, utilitarian, like Birks or Crocs. But the clogs are polarizing because they’re weird looking. First off, they are made of mottled brown rubber; while the manufacturer does make them in another color, a deep bottle green called “Vert,” Salter says the additional dye makes the material less sustainable and so Salter House chooses not to carry them. “So often with sustainable materials,” he says, “you have some messy evidence of the earth that it came from…whether it’s seeded bread or it’s a flax linen.” As a result, the clogs are a bit inconsistent—the sizing can be wonky, and the taupe color, created from the melting of the hemp’s sugar molecules, varies from pair to pair—so they still feel homespun.

The mule shape can still be a tough sell, but on TikTok, the challenge of styling “the most hated-on clogs” (or the potato-looking shoes that “the fashion boys are eating up lately”) draws curious viewers in. It’s a similar ethos that buoyed the broader ugly shoe of the last seven years or so: they’re comfortable, but on the right wearer, they also signal discerning taste.

After they appeared on the Bode runway, GQ’s own commerce writer Gerald Ortiz recommended the Plasticanas back in 2021, once he’d trekked over an hour from Ridgewood, Queens to Brooklyn Heights to purchase a pair at Salter House. The store still had limited sizing and stock back then. “I had seen that they would get a restock and sell out really fast, which made me want them even more,” Ortiz says. He liked the low-cut shape as a sleeker alternative to his Birkenstock Bostons.

After his endorsement, Ortiz recalls “at least 17 people” reaching out to him about them. There were more high-brow write-ups, too, in places like New York Magazine and the Financial Times. Now, he sees them around all time—which, in turn, means he wears his own Gardanas less frequently these days. “I am one of those fickle guys that is like if I see something enough, I will not want to wear it anymore,” he admits. “I still think it’s a really handsome shoe, honestly.”

More recently, they’ve become a hit among New York’s community of hip chefs. That includes Nadine Ghantous, a sous chef at the buzzy Ridgewood restaurant Rolo’s—and, full disclosure, my roommate. Nestled among the overpopulated shoe rack by our apartment’s front door, I noticed Ghantous owns not one but three pairs of Plasticanas. (She recently replaced her first set, after enough stray coals from working the kitchen’s wood-fired oven had melted holes through the soles.) Ghantous first saw a stranger wearing them a few years ago, “somewhere around the Bedford L stop on a Saturday morning when, like, everyone’s out and dressed,” she recalls. “I liked them so much that I spent probably upwards of three hours on eBay just looking up ‘gardening shoes’ to try to find them.”

For the same reasons they’re practical on a rainy day—nonslip and waterproof—they’re useful for restaurant workers. As of late, most of the back- and front-of-house staff at Rolo’s are decked out in Plasticanas. I’m half-expecting the clogs to show up on Ayo Edebiri’s stylish chef de cuisine character Sydney Adamu in the upcoming third season of The Bear.

Now, Salter House ships them globally, Ortiz has seen them around Los Angeles, and Ghantous spotted a couple pairs on a recent trip to London. Turns out, there are many audiences for this earthy, freaky shoe with a dreamy pedigree. Wearing a gardening shoe around New York City (or anywhere else not primarily covered in soil) offers a bit of provincial fantasy, even if their waterproofness can come in handy, given how frequently dips in the sidewalks can invite pools of precarious liquids. France, gardening, weed…what’s not to like?

Consider the inventor of the Plasticana material itself, André Ravachol, who first combined recycled vinyl and hemp fibers into the polymer in the late 1990s and considers himself an “environmental poet.” (Salter describes him as a “true believer” who “generally speaks enthusiastically about the merits of hemp and the potential of hemp.”) More than a decade after he introduced them to Salter at Maison & Objet, Ravachol still maintains a lo-fi blog documenting their popularity.

“Personally, I know that wearing them poses the question of what socks or if socks more than most shoes do,” says Salter, “in the same way that the idea of adding a Birkenstock with socks causes people a total crisis.” For his part, he prefers his Plasticanas with added insoles and nice wool socks.

Gardana Clog

$62.00, Salter House

Originally Appeared on GQ

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