Steve Jobs’s Beat-Up Birkenstocks Sold for $218,000. A Fan Made His Own.

The Steve Jobs -owned Birkenstocks that sold at auction last November looked like they’d been run over by a semitruck full of iPhones. Worn by the Apple impresario throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the straps on the brown suede sandals were saggy and stretched, the leather insoles were curling at the edges like burned paper and the footbed was about as black as a well-done steak. 

And yet, the pulverized shoes hammered out for a staggering $218,000—a reflection of Jobs’s lofty status as a pop-cultural icon almost a decade after his death. 

The buyer of Jobs’s sandals remains a mystery. They were on display at a Birkenstock event in New York City just weeks after they were sold at auction, but at the time the German footwear company denied that it purchased them.

So when a pair of smashed-in sandals that looked identical to Jobs’s famed Birkenstocks surfaced on the Instagram account of a Paris-based product-creator who goes by Josewong last month, people thought the mystery was solved.  

Comments poured in congratulating Josewong, 23, on his seemingly historical acquisition. “This is the craziest flex ive seen to date” read one comment. “No Wayyyy you won them???” offered another. As images of the shoes spread outward, even more footwear fanatics and tech-industry watchers became convinced that this young designer, who wasn’t yet a teenager when Jobs died in 2011, had taken home the most famous sandals this side of Jesus. 

But, Josewong hadn’t actually plopped down the price of a tiny Cupertino studio apartment on the shoes. No, the designer, a full-blown Steve Jobs fanboy, took a page from the enterprising tech icon and created a pair himself.

Steve Jobs built the iPod. Josewong built a replica version of Steve Jobs’s sandals.

 “Steve Jobs had always been someone that I look up to,” wrote Josewong over email. “His dressing style, especially his unique sandals, is always something that people would like to imitate or try on.” 

Beyond his prowess as a Silicon Valley Merlin, Jobs’s footwear choices—or often, lack thereof—have remained a persistent fascination well past his death. He’s been held up as a dadcore icon for his near-religious dedication to New Balance’s blocky running sneakers. He was often photographed during his lifetime going conspicuously barefoot around the Apple offices. In his biography of Jobs, author Walter Isaacson recalled how in the mid-1970s, the budding tech savant arrived at the Atari offices wearing sandals and was referred to as a “hippie kid.”

Over five months, Josewong painstakingly recreated Jobs’s battered suede shoes, copying each crease, fold and charred toe print. 

“I tried to match all details from the original pair, even the colorway of the hardware,” he wrote of his replicas. He has never seen Jobs’s authentic pair in person, so he and his manufacturer in China had to rely on existing photos of the shoes to duplicate the details.

“It was not easy,” said Josewong, of nailing all the fades and folds. The only apparent differences between his duplicates and the pair that once graced Apple’s offices are the metal buckles which say “ABCDbyJoseWong” (his brand’s name) and the factory-fresh sole. 

Josewong created 30 pairs of the shoes for himself and friends and so far has no plans to sell them. The goal of the shoes, he said, was “to help people build up a closer bond to the person that they look up to by allowing them to have a pair of sandals that their idol used to wear.” 

Josewong has toyed with oddball clothing experiments before. He once created a motorcycle helmet with oversize ears jutting out of the top and a hoodie with Jackie Chan’s face spliced into a camo motif. But his recreated Steve Jobs sandals have garnered the most attention—and confusion—of anything he’s created thus far. 

Through a representative, Birkenstock didn’t comment for this article.

After Josewong initially posted the shoes, the confusion grew once his friend—New York-based clothing designer and animator Gavin South—posted a photo on X, formerly known as Twitter, of himself wearing the replica sandals with a very Jobsian outfit of a black turtleneck and jeans. At that point, many accounts started to post that it was South who won the shoes. 

“It’s just funny,” said South, who was fairly nonplussed by the newfound attention. “He is an icon, but does it mean anything to me, personally? No,” he said. 

When Josewong first sent him a photo of his replica sandals, South was baffled by their level of distress. “I’m like, are y’all walking around in the factory barefoot for days to get them looking like that?” 

Once he got his hands on the shoes, he appreciated the amount of work his friend had put into aping the Apple co-founder’s sandals. “The amount of technical things you have to do to make a used looking pair of Birkenstocks is crazy,” he said. 

While unlikely to fetch as much money on the open market, Josewong’s replica shoes do have one advantage over Jobs’s pre-worn pair: They don’t come preloaded with foot odor. Said Gavin of his friend’s experiment, “They smell like new shoes.”

Write to Jacob Gallagher at [email protected]