Imagine you were tasked with inventing the perfect sneaker. You might borrow the bubble of a Nike Air Max, or copy the perfectly pitched wedge silhouette from the Adidas Samba. Add some quotation marks from Off-White and glue on an extra sole to make it more like a Triple S, and presto-chango: You’ve got a dope shoe!

This sort of Franken-hype monster was exactly what Archibald London wanted to avoid when they set out to design the perfect sneaker. So they asked the pickiest guys on the internet to help them get it right.

For the past year, Archibald London has been developing a new sneaker with the aid of Styleforum, and this week they released it to the public for pre-order. Since August of 2019, the most hallowed amateur council in American menswear has been painstakingly reviewing every design detail to create the perfect sneakers. The exact length of the vamp, the correct number of lace holes. Styleforum was founded by Fok-Yan Leung in the aughts as an early bastion of #menswear. It has since morphed into its own incredibly fastidious fashion subculture, a place where men post their selfies on what looks like Web 1.0 message boards for the edification of their peers, followed by bruising rounds of comments about the exact width of the poster’s lapels. Leung rejects the term “nerds.” He calls his users “product obsessives.”

The object of this obsession is called the SF-01: hand-stitched by Italian artisans and offered in a rainbow of antiqued calfskin and suedes. When I first heard about these shoes, I felt a familiar tingle in my PayPal account, but when I finally saw the product shots, that urge to cop turned to bemusement. To create this shoe, Archibald compiled hundreds of Styleforum user comments, extracted 16,000 data points from a detailed survey, and went through multiple rounds of samples. The end result is a sneaker that’s sleek and minimally branded. It is also strikingly similar to the Common Projects Achilles Low, the shoe that kicked off the luxury-sneaker boom in the first place.

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How had so much time and effort produced something that was nearly identical to a sneaker we all know so well? Was this just an algorithm giving the people what it thought they wanted? Was this in fact what they wanted? Or was this shoe truly, if imperceptibly, better than its competitors? Clearly, many people had thought long and hard about this. How had they come to this decision?

Archibald London is a strange example of a larger burgeoning trend in menswear. When I spoke to founder and CEO Rohan Dhir, he called the company “luxe direct-to-consumer.” His mission, like that of so many of his DTC peers, is: “True craftsmanship, direct connections, no middlemen.” That claim doesn’t quite ring true—customers are still using a go-between to get their products, just without the wholesale, marketing, and brick-and-mortar-retail costs that drive up prices on most luxury goods. But just as Everlane does for basics and Daniel Wellington does for watches, Archibald shows customers a full breakdown of their costs with transparent pricing, and then passes those “savings” on to their customer.

Most of these businesses focus on one product category: denim at Gustin or cashmere at Nadaam. But Archibald has broader ambitions. The company sells shoes, clothing, leather goods, linens, knives, copper pots and pans, and, soon, olive oil. But initially, Archibald was born in 2014 after Dhir heard a talk from Warby Parker cofounder Neil Blumenthal in business school and decided to get in on the direct-to-consumer action. Intent on starting up his own cheap and trendy glasses brand, Dhir traveled to China but was disappointed by the quality of the products. A friend suggested he try making glasses in Japan. Of course, the price point would be higher than the $99 glasses Warby Parker was offering, but it would still be way less expensive than luxury brands like Oliver Peoples or Moscot. Perhaps there was an opening in the middle? From glasses, they moved on to hand-stitched dress shoes, and from dress shoes, they found their way to sneakers.