I wrote a fun one for my friends at GQ about the designer loafers I’ve been wearing consistently for the last year and why specifically I have been doing that. Why not read it below:
https://www.gq.com/story/loafers-sound-good-to-me
https://www.gq.com/story/loafers-sound-good-to-me
https://www.gq.com/story/loafers-sound-good-to-me
Thanks for reading, I hope it wasn’t too heavy.
I had a bunch of things I cut from the post, mostly personal stuff from the first draft, don’t remember what any of it is, so obviously it wasn’t important, and all the good stuff is in the post (thank you for reading). I also didn’t want to write on GQ that me wearing loafers with athletic wear(1) is fully in line with the thematic and stylistic underpinnings of the way I dress now, but is actually a logical conclusion, since readers of a major monthly magazine and god-tier website don’t know that about me, but a few newsletter readers might so I am putting it in here since I don’t have any movie reviews. Also it’s only a logical conclusion retroactively, really.
Additionally, in the interest of not muting the piece, and my growth as a character, I left out that loafers and white socks are a solid Take Ivy proposition and switching to them, while a big jump for someone who consistently dresses like a groundskeeper, is really just the first in what I see as a path of both willfully advanced/wrong and simultaneously archly conservative dress for me going forward, the specifics of which I am experimenting with slightly and the boundaries of which haven’t been fully reached. Conservatism in dress is good, it’s why people get fades and is why Brooks Brothers is still in business. My trainer said that you can’t have too much flexibility and you need tension, I think that applies to both dressing oneself and to leg day. If you’re too flexible, or if you’re guided by that exclusively, mistakes get made.
More on white socks and loafers: the combination is in fact a hallowed menswear tradition that until like, the Johnson administration, was considered a casual state of dress. We must remember that, just as with religion, gender, sexuality, casualness is a continuum. There’s a line in The Reckoning, David Halberstam’s best book, the one about Ford and Toyota, where an Ford executive (maybe 1970s) is wearing grey trousers and a blue blazer to a meeting and another executive goes to him, “starting your weekend early, eh, Johnson?'“ Incredible. So, by lights of the C-suite of the Ford motor company, loafers are casual clothing. I think you really need a doctorate to get to the bottom of this.
I also think there is a difference between wearing loafers a la Michael Jackson and a la Paul Weller. Each wear theirs with white socks and highwater/tailored pants or ones with a short break, but Weller works it so much better. I think it’s because his dress was in dialogue with Gene Kelly and informed by 1970s British suedeheads/skinheads(1) and mods, which are like, the freshest youth groups there ever were. It was always a little disappointing Jackson wore Florsheims.
That’s it for me.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1)Tom Herman is scum