The Shoes of HP Lovecraft?

By now, almost everyone who has googled H.P. Lovecraft at some point has found Lovecraft Biofuels or the adult toy store that also carries his name (in a different sense, of course). Now, add the New York City based H.P. Lovecraft shoe brand to the list of "other" Lovecraft items that have nothing to do with the weird writer. The footwear designer appears to be a newer alternative to both the clothing market and the world of online business. They deal in soft white Indie style shoes plastered in snazzy pop culture imagery and underground punk music icons from the 1980s.

It would be interesting to learn whether or not their selection of the H.P. Lovecraft name is intentional (which it may well be, how many others could there be?), and if so why. Alas, this blogger's online explorations on the matter yielded nothing. The probable correlation of name with author, however, presents a very perplexing case indeed--this shoe brand is about as far removed as possible from H.P. Lovecraft's personal preferences, and presents no designs based on horror at all. Lovecraft notoriously hated New York City, considering it veritable imprisonment during his brief marriage with Sonia Greene. Although punk music of various stripes hasn't always been at odds with Lovecraftiana--in fact, dark punk groups like The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets churn out plenty of catchy tunes based on HPL's fiction--the punk breed represented by these shoes appears to have very little in common with the Providence writer. Moreover, if you gave Lovecraft access to a time machine set for the late 20th to early 21st centuries, you would almost certainly find a perplexed and disgusted puritan standing amidst the counter-cultural circles of punk in bewildered observation. He might even get a sequel to "The Music of Erich Zann" out of it, providing he made it back to his own time with deep enough impressions of the tunes that would sound like gibbering outre madness to the early 20th century ear.

Perhaps it's best to leave it at that. As with most tangential happenings in the long and strange history of Lovecraftiana, this New York City alternative shoe label sharing the name of our favorite literary giant is just one more queer synchronicity.

-Grim Blogger