Old Dog, New Tricks: Hush Puppies Find a Fashion Niche : Footwear: The look is retro, casual and colorful. And the company is having a tough time keeping up with orders.

The customer was perfectly Hush Puppies: a doctor who wanted a pair for his son, an accountant.

*

Only the shoes were suede slip-ons in a Technicolor shade of purple called wild violet. And the buyer for one of the trendiest shops in New York City had a tough time getting his hands on a pair.

“The Hush Puppies run out the door. We can’t keep them stocked,” said Christopher Baetz, the menswear buyer for Charivari’s four stores in Manhattan, where suits sell for $1,200.

Hush Puppies? The boring lace-ups whose image was based on a basset hound and a reputation for being comfortable, inexpensive and sensible ? The shoes for back-to-school youths and dads who changed out of wingtips to mow the lawn?

Funky, hip and colorful? Clearly, not your father’s Hush Puppies.

But they are Hush Puppies, and yes, they really are making a comeback, centered in fashion circles in New York and Los Angeles, where the $80 shoes are displayed alongside $360 Italian penny loafers and $325 Dries Van Noten boots.

The suede pigskins have been featured in men’s fashion shows and a GQ magazine spread. The fall line includes such spicy colors as hot pepper, oxford blue, wild violet and forest green (which, the Hush Puppies guys insist, was named before Forrest Gump’s Hush Puppy-clad feet were seen on any movie screen.)

“I love them. I think they’re amazing. . . . I think they’re the fiercest,” said Joel Fitzpatrick, a designer who owns the Pleasure Swell in Los Angeles.

“It’s like there is nothing more kitsch-Americana than Hush Puppies,” Fitzpatrick said. The look is retro, casual and appeals to “everyone from the girls who read Sassy to really hip fashion people in their 50s.”

None of this came too easily for the people back at Hush Puppies’ home, a conservative western Michigan town with rolling hills and summer parades along Main Street, where people wear Hush Puppies because they fit well.

“While we’ve always been considered comfortable, it’s been a long time since we’ve been considered fashionable,” Hush Puppies Vice President Owen Baxter noted wryly as he discussed the comeback at the suburban Grand Rapids headquarters of the shoemaker’s parent, Wolverine World Wide.

For about the past three years, Hush Puppies executives had been working, well, doggedly to change that. They seized the concept of “casual office” dressing. They worried, just a little, when the camera lingered on Gump’s shoes as a feather floated between his feet at the end of the movie.

And then along came John Bartlett, a New York designer who wanted to use Hush Puppies in his fall fashion runway show in New York.

“This couldn’t have happened five years ago,” Bartlett said of his interest in the shoe. “People would have said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great. But give me something new.’

“Hush Puppies were never fashionable, so that’s what makes them so fashionable now. They’re so sort of effortless.”

For his runway show, Bartlett had the people back at Hush Puppies take their traditional shoe and make it blue. And purple. And orange.

“He picked colors that a shoe man wouldn’t have picked in a million years,” said Hush Puppies marketing director Jeff Lewis. “I think we were going to just innocently look at these shoes and then go back to the browns and blacks and grays.”

But then something really weird happened: People loved them.

“Once we saw the reactions to the color, we realized there was a market out there for it,” Baxter said.

The market was large enough that the company is having a tough time keeping up with orders. Since the shoe was introduced in February, Hush Puppies has sold 150,000 pairs. (That’s as many as they sell annually for the original Hush Puppies shoe, the Duke.) They’re upping production to 15,000 pairs per week starting in the third quarter.

Understanding the shoes, Baxter said, is like turning on a light switch--there’s nothing gradual about it. Either you get it or you don’t.

And not everyone gets it.

At Loma Vista Hardware in Kansas City--still a traditional hardware store, only now the owner’s son operates a fashion boutique on the top floor--the shoes are hot sellers, averaging about 10 pairs a day.

But when boutique owner Todd Dean first took out a newspaper ad promoting the shoes, “everyone who responded were grandparents, 60 to 70 years old, who wore the shoes when they were kids. They were looking for the traditional old Hush Puppies.”

And Dean thought the Hush Puppies people were knocking on the wrong door when they first approached him.

“How could someone as hip and forward as my customers understand Hush Puppies? I thought, ‘You’re crazy. You’re absolutely crazy,’ ” he said.

“It makes you think: I guess anything dead could come back again.”