Feast Your Eyes on the Chicken-Scented KFC x Crocs Collaboration

Today in cursed sentences: The long-awaited(?), highly anticipated(?) result of a fried-chicken footwear collaboration between KFC and Crocs is finally hitting the market. On July 28, hypebeasts and Colonel Sanders fetishists everywhere will be able to purchase the limited-edition shoes on Crocs’ website, for just $59.99 (for comparison, a pair of classic Crocs clogs costs $44.99).

The KFC Crocs were first introduced effectively a lifetime ago back in February, during New York Fashion Week. As part of that unveiling, artist MLMA wore a high-platform version of the shoes, designed to look like haute couture buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken for your feet.

The KFC Crocs that will be sold next week aren’t the platform version, but they are equipped with plenty of their own “charm” — literally, they come with two Croc “Jibbitz” charms that are supposed to look and smell like fried chicken drumsticks. “Not for human consumption,” the official description warns, but I can guarantee you that at least one human and maybe several dogs will try to physically consume the fake-chicken charms.

This is far from the first time a fast-food chain has dabbled in wearables (although perhaps the first collaboration with sensible-footwear brand Crocs). As Matthew Sedacca wrote for Eater in 2018, with the rise of food in pop culture, “food companies are creating merch their customers are actually willing to pay for in order to rep their obsessions.” In this collision of high and low culture, street style and Vogue, irony and sincerity, fast food and fashion, mass-market branded merch has emerged as genuinely covetable products, to the point where Kim Kardashian West shows them off, and Hypebeast lists them as anticipated drops. Finger lickin’ good for KFC?