What Are Those?

Origin

The video was made by Brandon Moore, who posted online as Young Busco. On June 14, 2015, he uploaded a clip to Instagram in which he approaches a police officer, points at the officer’s plain black shoes, and demands, at volume:

“What are thoooose?!”

The delivery is the whole thing — a drawn-out, incredulous howl, aimed at footwear that is entirely unremarkable. The post took over 2,300 likes and 1,200 comments within three weeks.

Four days later, on June 18, 2015, a reposted version on Vine took over 20 million loops, 271,000 likes and 136,000 revines within two weeks, and the phrase was everywhere.

The construction is older than the clip. It had been defined on Urban Dictionary since October 2, 2011, and there is a well-known precursor in Disney’s Hercules (1997), where Hades asks the same question on noticing a pair of novelty sandals.

What it means / how it’s used

The phrase mocks somebody’s shoes, specifically and loudly. It is used to point at footwear the speaker considers cheap, dated, unfashionable, or simply strange, and the tone is always exaggerated.

Its uses:

• Direct shoe mockery, the original and dominant form.
• Extended to any conspicuous item of clothing.
• Applied metaphorically to a bad choice of anything.
• Self-deprecating versions about the poster’s own footwear.

The comedy relies on disproportion. The reaction is enormous, the offence is minor, and everyone involved knows it — which keeps the format playful rather than cruel.

How it spread

Vine drove the initial explosion, and celebrity adoption cemented it. On August 4, 2015, Michael Jordan was asked the question at a basketball camp Q&A. He took it well, admitted he was “lost in that Vine stuff,” and identified his shoes by model — a response that generated more coverage than the prank.

Through late 2015 the phrase was inescapable across Vine, Instagram and Twitter, and it became one of the defining catchphrases of Vine’s final period before the platform shut down in 2017.

Brandon Moore continued creating and performing after the clip. He died in 2020, and tributes at the time noted that a phrase he improvised in a few seconds had entered the language.

Notable examples & variations

• The original Vine repost, the version most people saw.
• The Michael Jordan exchange.
• Versions applied to non-footwear items.
• Recreations by other creators and athletes.
• Text-only use, still common.

Legacy / cultural impact

“What are those?” is one of the most durable exports of Vine, a platform that lasted barely four years and produced a disproportionate share of the decade’s catchphrases — six-second videos being an unusually efficient format for a single memorable line.

The phrase has fully entered general speech, used by people who never had Vine and could not name the man who said it. That is the standard fate of a catchphrase, and in this case a slightly sad one: the line is permanent, and its author is far less widely known than his own sentence.