In the documentary, Madden's employees recount stories of his being inspired by shoes he saw on the street. "I've actually seen him say, 'Let me buy you a new pair of shoes and let me take the one off your foot,'" Karla Frieders, Chief Merchandising Officer for Steve Madden, says in the film. However, beyond the grunge styles that had always been a huge influence for Madden, he tells Bustle he doesn't recall any specific inspiration behind The Slinky.

The Slinky was far from the first Steve Madden shoe, but the eponymous founder of the brand tells Bustle the release of that design in 1994 seemed to coincide with the company becoming a household name. "[The Slinky] was just a great shoe. It had the magic," Madden tells Bustle. "What can I tell ya? Like a great song. What can you say? It's just one of those things."Madden took a break from shoes until after college, when he got a job at Jildor in Long Island, then moved to New York City and started working at L.J. Simone Shoes where he got to do "every job in the shoe business." He lived in the East Village, which was home to many in the post-punk, hardcore set, plus was heavily involved in the club scene during the early '80s. The grunge-y styles worn by residents of that neighborhood undoubtedly had a significant inspirational hand in the designs Madden brought to the shoe industry once he launched his company in 1990.

But it's not an exact match to the original Slinky: "We changed it a little bit, made it more modern," Madden tells Bustle. Crystal Ro at BuzzFeed pointed out that the sole and stitching are slightly different, but it's essentially the same sandal you came to love in high school — all the way down to the signature fwap. After some time in the basement of the shoe store, Madden says he made his way to the selling floor, where he got even more obsessed with shoes and the role they played in women's day to day lives. "I was trying to figure out why something became big, why something became popular," he says in the documentary. The Slinky certainly seemed like the magic spell the brand had been waiting for: In the recently released documentary Maddman: The Steve Madden Story , Daianara "Dee" Amalfitano, former president of specialty brands for Steve Madden, recalled that after The Slinky was released, "all of a sudden, every girl I spoke to knew who Steve Madden was."With his chunky platform designs aimed at teenage shoppers, Madden was considered a bit of an outsider in the high-fashion world when he first started to seriously hit the scene. "Both the fashion industry and, I think, the media industry at the time did not take teenagers seriously," Mary Clark, the Former Creative Director of Sassy, says in the documentary. Madden, however, did.