Read: Why women’s shoes are so painful

Instead, for Allbirds’ entire three-year existence, I’ve hated what I believed the company was pushing. I spent a decade covering the fashion industry, and the “noise” the company cut through with its super-simple shoes, I told myself, was actually a vibrant, imaginative world of glow-in-the-dark high tops and snakeskin stilettos. Allbirds seemed like a way for men to intellectualize their way out of personal taste in favor of start-up culture’s efficient sameness. I had, on more than one occasion, referred to the shoes derisively as “Yeezys for software developers.”

Press coverage of the company is divided along similar lines: Some writers praise the brand’s style and functionality, while others lament its popularity as proof that the algorithms are winning. Much of the fashion industry is firmly in the latter camp.

Structurally and philosophically, the fashion industry isn’t great at dealing with change. American life has been casualizing since the 1990s, and nowhere is that clearer than in offices. The trend has left both designers and shoppers confused about what people should be wearing for jobs that were very different (or entirely nonexistent) before the advent of the cellphone.

Now Silicon Valley is stepping into the rift it helped create. Start-ups want to help people get dressed—and they might beat fashion at its own game.

In another time, developing manufacturing or textile technologies and licensing them to existing brands might have been the whole story of these new companies. But the upheaval in the American wardrobe has let outsiders into fashion’s territory, according to the fashion historian Nancy Deihl. “The idea of ‘careerwear’ is so dispersed and a little less determined,” says Deihl, a professor at New York University. “The career office [at NYU] has these little workshops on what to wear to interviews and things because there isn’t this kind of monolithic style guidance out there.”

Not only has the American office gone more casual, but work itself has changed since Dockers started pushing business-casual dressing in 1992. More women than ever before are living full professional lives, and they need shoes that do much more than just look appropriately conservative with a skirt suit. “It isn’t like, ‘Oh, I wear sneakers while I commute and then I put my heels on in the office,’” says Kerry Cooper, the president and chief operating officer of Rothy’s, a start-up that specializes in women’s shoes and rivals Allbirds in newfound prominence. “That’s just sort of a silly, nonmodern way of thinking.”

Six months ago, I bought a pair of Rothy’s. Nothing about start-up shoes had changed, but my job had: When The Atlantic hired me, I left the fashion world and found myself in a realm of indeterminate business-casualness. In spite of years spent writing about how people shop, I had no idea what I was supposed to wear. The harder I looked for an answer, the clearer it became that no one else did, either.