The modern athletic shoe has been so aggressively engineered for cushioning that your feet barely have to function at all. This leads to issues with gait, posture, and overall foot strength, with many other downstream consequences. Many "barefoot" shoes have been developed to help combat this, using thin soles and wide toe boxes to let the foot interact with the ground naturally as intended. The problem? A lot of these barefoot shoes are quite ugly.

Tolos has addressed that problem: a canvas high-top with a 7mm stack that lets your feet do their actual job. Cotton canvas upper, cotton laces, metal eyelets, tactile rubber outsole. It looks like a regular sneaker, but the ground feedback is completely different. Not made in America, but these are about as natural as sneakers get.