There is every chance that 2026 will be the year you see your first pair of Gardana gardening clogs in the wild. In fact, if you spend much time on TikTok, or live in Brooklyn, you’ve probably already been seeing them for months, if not years. I saw my first pair a few weeks ago. I watched a dad dropping his kids off at school in head-to-toe Carhartt, a pair of Gardanas peeping out from below his trousers like a shy frog.
Pliable, but with a sturdy sole, they go for as little as £25. The work of French “environmental poet” André Ravachol, who founded the Plasticana brand behind the clogs in 1998, they’re made from 100% recycled PVC and hemp, which gives them their earthy-caramel or, as Vogue put it, “bird-pooey” hue. They have since been called “maybe the coolest shoes in London” by one TikToker, as he Lime-biked his way through the capital to try to nab a pair.
Gardanas already had fashion credentials thanks to US brand Bode, shorthand for beautifully craft-centric and exorbitantly expensive clothes, which sent them down the catwalk in 2020. No doubt buoyed up by that, they became known as the “I live in Brooklyn’ shoes”, but now the streets of certain quarters of the UK are being infiltrated with their swampy ways.
Josh Chalmers, a gardener at the West Sussex rewilding project Knepp, loves them. They are, he says, ideal for the walled garden where he works. “Wearing a delicate shoe is pivotal,” he says, “The plants grow really small and slowly, and so lots of plants can fit in a smaller space.”
He also wears them to hang out in Brighton, where he lives. ”They’re a great in between … I can wear them to do the job that I do and then I can literally hop into the shop and look like a normal person.” He’s been known to style them with a bright yellow sock and points out that they pair perfectly with trendy selvedge denim: “The colour together is just chef’s kiss.”
TikTokers style them with everything from hickory stripes to suit trousers, with their bedrooms and city streets visible in the background, not allotments or raised beds. They sit low on the foot, allowing for such natty sock styling as Chalmers’.
People aren’t buying them at their local garden centre. Fancy haberdasher and “purveyor of classic British elegance” Drake’s sells them, as does online concept store and clothing brand Plümo, and hippy-inflected, Urban Outfitters Inc-owned Free People. So does Straw, a fancy lifestyle shop in east London, which, as the only UK bricks-and-mortar shop that currently stocks the shoes, invites shoe pilgrimages.
Hugo MacGregor-Craig, co-founder of Straw, says that while they have been in demand since they first started stocking them three years ago, TikTok has introduced them to a new, younger audience. Most of his customers are buying them to wear in town, but it’s their gardening credentials that he credits with making them great for urban wear, “especially in UK weather”.
While Chalmers wouldn’t call himself a trailblazer, he definitely hopped on them early, buying his first pair about four years ago. He was working at the Bloomsbury set’s Charleston house in Sussex at the time, “and everyone there was just so obsessed with them”.
It was around this time that fashion sprouted green fingers, and menswear designer Kim Jones did a collection inspired by Charleston. There was a moment, which Chalmers thinks is “still very much in the zeitgeist”, of gardening and vegetables and “basically growing a world that we wish we lived in”. It was also around this time that designer JW Anderson debuted a pair of amphibious Wellipet clogs in Milan. Since then, fashion’s flowers have continued to grow: chore jackets à la Monty Don have been on numerous designer moodboards, gardens have been dug for inspiration by brands from Burberry to Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior, back to Anderson, who recently put his name behind a set of antique gardening tools. This week, he even started to sell his own take on gardening shoes; all things horticulture have been cultivated by high-fashion’s rich soils.
But while the Gardanas are the zenith of the clog genre, there are a Sissinghurst’s worth of other iterations. Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex has been spotted feeding her chickens in Crocs’ Dylan clog. Jennifer Lawrence zhuzhed hers up with no socks and an anklet. Bella Hadid’s got a soft spot for a pair that is a collaboration between high-fashion brand Proenza Schouler and rugged Canadian footwear brand Sorel. Of course, Birkenstock do them and Danish brand Dansko offer pioneer-coded distressed honey ones. Town & Country has a pair for a tenner that it affectionately calls Cloggies. Toast sells a suede pair, the work of ruddy-cheeked outdoorsy brand Blundstone, they presumably wouldn’t be much good in a dank compost heap, but they look lovely.
Gardening clogs offer up an off-the-grid wholesomeness, and, of course, gardening, which Dr Bridget Dalton, a semiotician and cultural analyst at Truth Consulting, says, “is about ease, it’s about pottering, it’s about [being] in your space; you cultivate it, but it’s a mindful, restful, connecting, grounding activity”. She mentions them in the same breath as the chore jacket that has become ubiquitous on creative directors in recent years. “Are these chore jackets for your feet?” she asks. They’re #slowlife and cottagecore adjacent; anyone living the cottage life is going to find a pair by their back door to slip on and tend their hollyhocks and delphiniums useful, and many people not living in a cottage will want to borrow – whether to subvert or leverage – some of that atmosphere they bring.
According to award-winning gardener Charlie McCormick, traditional clogs are simply “very practical and convenient to slip on and off … they are brilliant in the winter – you are high off the ground – and likewise in summer”. Plus, he says, they are “good to go and dig veg”.
But, while truly a shoe for our contradictory, whiplash-inducing age, they’re also a cult item – part of the churn – that people will cross cities to try to buy because they’ve seen them online. Clogs in general are the kind of item worn by people who need foot support and comfort for long hours such as chefs, and nurses (Dansko is a favoured brand) and, yes, also while gardening. This does raise the omnipresent conversation of appropriation and the borrowing of the optics of hard work for leisure pursuits slash Fashion with a capital F, it seems they’re being worn outside for outside pursuits, so it’s perhaps OK to offer some leeway on that front. (Interestingly the professional gardeners of the Royal Horticultural Society have to wear protective footwear when working, even if some may wear Gardanas or the like in their own gardens.)
They sit neatly in the genre of “ugly shoes”, which has made it as aspirational, if not more so, to look down at shoes that mimic lumpy root vegetables, as to look down at slinky kitten heels. They’re gross and beautiful and confusing and, honestly, the more you look at them the more you may grow to like them – which is sort of how the “ugly” shoe thing works. Did you initially feel disgust and now feel a tiny pinprick of desire? Well, if it’s the Gardanas in particular you’re after, you’ll probably have to wait. Most places are already sold out.
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