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Your Shoes Have a Season Too

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Footwear Colour & Fabric Watches & Accessories
Neo W.
Author
Neo W.
Writing about things that intrigue me.
Table of Contents

Your Shoes Have a Season Too
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There’s a man in Los Angeles who sunbathes in swim trunks and black leather oxfords. Everyone can see why that’s wrong and almost nobody applies the same logic one step up — wearing winter shoes with summer clothes and wondering why the outfit feels off.

Footwear is seasonal and gets treated as permanent
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Men accept seasonality everywhere else. Nobody wears a wool coat in July or linen in December. Shoes somehow escape the rule, and the same black oxfords get worn across twelve months while everything above them changes.

They shouldn’t. Black leather dress shoes belong with dark suits in cooler months. In summer the equivalents are loafers, espadrilles, and leather sandals — all of which do the same job of not being flip-flops while actually suiting the weather.

Which brings up the other end. Flip-flops are for water. If there’s no water in sight — the supermarket, a restaurant, walking into town — they’re the wrong answer, and they expose your toes to a world that didn’t ask.

Fabric is the cheat code
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If you only change one thing, change what your clothes are made of. Heavy cotton t-shirts and fast-fashion polyester hold heat against your skin.

Linen, seersucker, Egyptian cotton, lightweight tropical wool. That’s the entire list, and it does more for comfort than any styling decision.

The specifics worth knowing
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  • Shorts are daytime. Genuinely hot, casual, active — fine. Evening is a more formal time of day whether or not the restaurant enforces it.
  • Hem above the knee. Inseams run from about 5 to 13 inches; 7 or 9 works for most men, with 9 landing just above the knee. Five inches is fine poolside. Anything below the knee makes you look shorter and your legs thinner.
  • Sports sunglasses only during sport. Plastic wraparounds are for cycling and tennis. Tortoiseshell wayfarers or silver aviators at lunch — Ray-Ban, Persol, Moscot all make the classic shapes.
  • Sunglasses off indoors and after dark. You can see them and they can’t see you, which people experience as rude rather than cool. Top pocket.
  • Jerseys stay at the stadium. Wearing one to run errands communicates that you’d stopped thinking about it.
  • White linen only while it’s clean. Beautiful, and unforgiving. A trip to Miami turns up a lot of men in white linen trousers that don’t survive a close look. If you’re going to wear white, commit to the dry cleaning, check the chair before you sit, and put the napkin on your lap.

The reframe worth keeping
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Summer is arguably the best season to dress well in — the fabrics are more interesting, the colours are more forgiving, and the silhouettes are lighter.

It only goes wrong because heat provides a permanent excuse to stop choosing, and the excuse is available every day for three months. Every swap above is at least as comfortable as the thing it replaces. None of this asks you to be hotter for the sake of looking better; it asks you to notice that you’d stopped deciding.

A few small things to try
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  • Put your winter shoes away for the season, physically
  • Measure the inseam on your shorts and see how many are past nine inches
  • Buy one pair of espadrilles or loafers to replace the default flip-flops
  • Check your white linen in daylight before wearing it, not after

Related

Summer Style Is a Fabric Problem

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Colour & Fabric Footwear Dress Codes
Summer Style Is a Fabric Problem # Most men try to solve summer by removing clothes — shorter sleeves, fewer layers, no jacket. The better fix is changing what the clothes are made of, which lets you keep the shape and lose the heat. Start with what it’s woven from # Polyester and standard cotton hold heat against you. The summer fabrics don’t:

Only One Ascot Knot Stays Tied

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Dress Codes Watches & Accessories Colour & Fabric
Most people who try an ascot once and abandon it hit the same problem: by lunchtime it has gone slack and there’s nothing to be done about it. That’s a knot problem, not an ascot problem. One of the three knots holds all day. The other two can’t. The one to learn # The modified four-in-hand. Start with the right end about two inches longer than the left, then tie it exactly as you’d tie a normal four-in-hand — long end over and around, over again, up through the back, then down through the knot and pushed through.

Heat Is Not an Excuse to Stop Deciding

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Colour & Fabric Dress Codes Fit & Tailoring
Heat Is Not an Excuse to Stop Deciding # Nine summer rules, and they all come from the same place. Warmth plus informality makes people stop choosing and start defaulting — and every item below is what defaulting looks like. The nine # Flip flops away from water. Fine at a pool or a beach. Not in a supermarket or a restaurant. If there’s no water in sight, leave them. Espadrilles, loafers, or leather sandals do the same job without the sound. The wrong fabric. Heavy cotton and polyester don’t breathe, and almost all cheap summer clothing is polyester. Linen, seersucker, Egyptian cotton, tropical wool. This single choice does more for comfort than anything else here. Shorts after dark. Daytime and genuine heat, fine. Evening is a more formal time of day whether or not anyone enforces it, so change into trousers. Shorts past the knee. An 11 or 13 inch inseam makes you look shorter and your legs thinner. Seven or nine inches, hem just above the knee. Swim shorts can go to five. Winter shoes with summer clothes. Black leather dress shoes don’t belong with shorts. Footwear is seasonal in a way people accept for clothing and forget for shoes. Sports sunglasses when no sport is happening. Wrap-around frames are built for cycling. At lunch they just look like you came from somewhere else. Tortoiseshell wayfarers or plain aviators instead. Sports jerseys outside the stadium. They’re for watching the game at the game. Everything you wear says something, and this one says you’d stopped thinking about it. Sunglasses indoors or after sunset. You can see them and they can’t see you, which people find genuinely off-putting rather than mysterious. Fold them into a pocket. White trousers that aren’t clean. White linen is excellent and only while immaculate. Marked white is worse than not wearing white at all. If you’re going to, commit to the dry cleaning, check chairs before sitting, and use the napkin. The one rule underneath # Read them together and none are really about summer.