# "Your shoes should always be darker than your pants" ???



## Billax (Sep 26, 2011)

Not so fast!
Tennies








Tennies








White Bucks








White Bucks








Saddle Shoes








Saddle Shoes








Not to mention spectators!


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## arkirshner (May 10, 2005)

Yes, but you do not get that much credit for showing pictures of children and an author. Please note that in the AA illustration the adult's brown shoes are darker than his pants.

The rule of thumb you mock was never intended to be applied all the time, it was intended to apply to town suits worn for business or other relatively formal occasions.


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## joenobody0 (Jun 30, 2009)

In your first picture, I see one person wearing shoes which are lighter than his pants. He's the worst dressed of all in the photo.


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## Billax (Sep 26, 2011)

arkirshner said:


> Yes, but you do not get that much credit for showing pictures of children and an author. Please note that in the AA illustration the adult's brown shoes are darker than his pants.
> 
> The rule of thumb you mock was never intended to be applied all the time, it was intended to apply to town suits worn for business or other relatively formal occasions.


Not mocking anything or anyone, Mr. Kirshner. Just demonstrating that it is _a rule of thumb_. I couldn't agree more that it was "intended to apply to town suits or other relatively formal occasions," as you so aptly put it.


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## Bjorn (May 2, 2010)

It draws attention to the shoes, away from the face. 

Shoes should be darker than the trousers. IMO...

Do we really want people looking at our feet rather than our faces?


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## Billax (Sep 26, 2011)

Bjorn said:


> It draws attention to the shoes, away from the face.
> 
> Shoes should be darker than the trousers. IMO...
> 
> Do we really want people looking at our feet rather than our faces?


With a face like yours, you may be right. With a face like mine ... well, a little more attention to the shoes would be a good thing!


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## Flanderian (Apr 30, 2008)

I don't know whose rule it is, but it isn't mine! :icon_saint7kg:

Though as ARK mentioned, it is more typical for me to wear with suits in more formal circumstances. However I will wear walnut, mid brown calf, or chocolate suede with navy without batting an eye. But for casual wear, my dirty bucks or dusty olive suede brogues will often be lighter than the wool or corduroy slacks with which I wear them.


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## Flanderian (Apr 30, 2008)

Bjorn said:


> It draws attention to the shoes, away from the face.


But how do you know this isn't a good thing? :devil:


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## Bjorn (May 2, 2010)

Flanderian said:


> But how do you know this isn't a good thing? :devil:


I see both your points (don't pm me pictures of yourself with pet iguana and ask me to point out which is which. The iguanas shoes will be darker than his pants) but the lighter shoes look does not look as good as the darker shoes look. I'm not saying its a rule that can't be successfully broken but I think it qualifies as a rule on its merits.

The guy above has mid brown shoes with a lighter suit, works great. Darken the suit or lighten the shoes and it does not look as good.


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## Billax (Sep 26, 2011)

Flanderian said:


> ... But for casual wear, my dirty bucks or dusty olive suede brogues will often be lighter than the wool or corduroy slacks with which I wear them.


Exactly!


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## arkirshner (May 10, 2005)

As rules of thumb have utility only in context, as a practical matter it seems that for the most part we are all in agreement. (Flandarian's walnut/navy days evidencing that, for the discriminating dresser, on "dandy" days, rules of thumb, are not absolutes).


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## Gravis (Jan 31, 2012)

I see this look a lot where the shoes are not darker than the pants.


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## arkirshner (May 10, 2005)

Gravis said:


> I see this look a lot where the shoes are not darker than the pants.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## Gravis (Jan 31, 2012)

arkirshner said:


> Gravis said:
> 
> 
> > I see this look a lot where the shoes are not darker than the pants.
> ...


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## zzdocxx (Sep 26, 2011)

Billax said:


> With a face like yours, you may be right. With a face like mine ... well, a little more attention to the shoes would be a good thing!


Funny.

OK so when are we supposed to wear all those snazzy AE shoes that come in such colors as Walnut and Chili?

Just when? ? ?


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## arkirshner (May 10, 2005)

Summer

























Actually the point is that the lighter browns are worn with lighter tone pants or suits and not for business or serious occasions.


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## Youthful Repp-robate (Sep 26, 2011)

Gravis said:


> I see this look a lot where the shoes are not darker than the pants.


Alright, I've seen the "half-buckled double-monk" look before. It's okay. Is that an unbuckled single monkstrap? What happens when he walks? Does he just float around through sheer force of telekinetic _sprezzatura_?


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## Marcolina (Feb 15, 2012)

Well not to offend someone i was really smiling when i look at the funny person in the first picture, and i realized that you said is right your shoes must be darker to your pants.


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## Bjorn (May 2, 2010)

The person wearing brown shoes looks better dressed than the two tone guy IMO. And the shoes are a large part of that.


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## eagle2250 (Mar 24, 2006)

LOL. I think perhaps we all tend to read a whole lot more into pictures/illustrations, than was ever intended by the creators! :icon_scratch: Our respective guts will tell us when we have it right, LOL, certainly (but alsa, perhaps just hopefully?) more reliably than a photo or an Ersky illustration!


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## andcounting (Apr 7, 2009)

eagle2250 said:


> LOL. I think perhaps we all tend to read a whole lot more into pictures/illustrations, than was ever intended by the creators! :icon_scratch: Our respective guts will tell us when we have it right, LOL, certainly (but alsa, perhaps just hopefully?) more reliably than a photo or an Ersky illustration!


Here here. I thank Billax for posting a thread that is PERFECT for that newly budding gentlemen who needs a simple thread with simple advice with simple challenges to the advice. This is one of those threads that can actually show up in a search and help someone.

But maybe I should take this more seriously??? Maybe I could challenge the perceived premise of the whole thing!!! Or... thanks for the thread.

As for chili shoes an the like, they do look great with lighter colored pants. Keeping the rule, but definitely seasonal.


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## Flanderian (Apr 30, 2008)

I'm the guy on the right! :icon_saint7kg:


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## Sartre (Mar 25, 2008)

Nothing more attractive than a pair of whiskey LHS paired with olive wool flannels -- as an example. These rules stifle creativity. Usually when a well-dressed man really turns my head in an airport or on the street he is wearing something out of the ordinary or in a way that is not ordinary.

Hewing too closely to these rules, for me, is like going out and buying your furniture at the same store and making sure that everything perfectly matches. I prefer the look where many different pieces of equal quality but differing style and provenance somehow all work together. Of course, there is something of an art to that.


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## Bjorn (May 2, 2010)

Flanderian said:


> I'm the guy on the right! :icon_saint7kg:
> 
> View attachment 3779


His shoes are darker than his suit... Or so my computer tells me...


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## zzdocxx (Sep 26, 2011)

I bet some people have more of an eye for that style, or panache, or whatever it is called, and are able to pull it off better.

And it may be like these beautiful young women models, they can throw on just about anything and it is going to look great. Ie. if you have the build and looks or even a certain confidence in the way you carry yourself, you may be able to make it.

Disclaimer: The above half-baked notions are those of a work-in-progress


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## zzdocxx (Sep 26, 2011)

There's been a bit of "conventional wisdom" floating around in the medical community for ages that the artist "El Greco" had an astigmatism, which caused him to draw his human figures in a quite elongated fashion.









St.Martin and the Beggar. 1597-99

Might your beloved Ersky have had the same condition?

:icon_study:


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## arkirshner (May 10, 2005)

^^^

The conventional wisdom about El Greco is wrong. James Ravin, "Jimmy" to those like my mother who knew him as a child, is an ophthalmologist who was an art history major at Michigan and has published two books on the influence of eyesight on artists. He was asked about El Greco by the NY Times and the following is from that article:

''People used to seek physicians' opinions when art became increasingly less representational,'' said Dr. Richard Brilliant, an art historian at Columbia University who has studied the links between art and medicine. ''People wanted to explain away modern art by saying the artist must be mentally disturbed, and they solicited physicians to confirm that the artist had a real disability.'' Style or Sickness? Science Corrects A Famous Mistake Experts are still trying to debunk once and for all an especially famous effort to explain an artist's distinctive style through a pat diagnosis. In 1913, Parisian doctors suggested that El Greco painted his remarkably elongated figures because he may have had astigmatism, an eye disorder in which the eyeball is shaped more like a football than a sphere. In some types of astigmatism that have been corrected with glasses, objects may appear somewhat elongated in one direction and slightly squashed in the other.

But as opthalmologists and others have repeatedly argued in the intervening years, the theory for El Greco is nonsense. Dr. James G. Ravin, an ophthalmologist in Toledo, Ohio, who has studied eye diseases of famous artists, points out that, without corrective lenses, astigmatics view the world as a blur. ''There's no evidence that there were lenses that could correct astigmatism in the sixteenth century,'' when El Greco lived, said Dr. Ravin. Others note that X-ray images taken of ElGreco's paintings show that beneath the painted figures are drawings of a more naturalistic composition, indicating that El Greco consciously chose to stretch out his images when he applied paint to lend them an ethereal feeling.

The entire article: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/11/...eye-of-a-physician.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

The typical adult is between 6 1/2 to 7 1/2 heads tall but a portrait using this ratio for the figure does not look right. 8, or 8 1/2 for heroic figures is the ratio typically used by artists. Charles I was less than 5 feet high but one would never guess it after looking at one of his portraits by Van ****. The AA artists simply took a bit of artistic/heroic license.


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## jwa_jwa_jwa (Jul 13, 2010)

Back to the original topic, I welcome this type of thread. As a matter of fact, just this morning I was wearing my walnut strands with a light brown pair of slacks and something in my eye kept telling me it didn't look right. I went back and changed the shoes to a burgundy brown.
Nonetheless, wearing light shoes is still something I'm hoping to learn how to do properly.


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## zzdocxx (Sep 26, 2011)

Sorry for one last small diversion, I tend to agree with ARK's doctors on this El Greco thing, my thinking is, wouldn't the same distortion apply to what he put on the canvas and therefore correct itself?

How'd I get started on this anyway?

OK sorry!


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## WouldaShoulda (Aug 5, 2009)

Youthful Repp-robate said:


> "...sheer force of telekinetic _sprezzatura_?"


I'm borrowing that!! :icon_cheers:


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## Urbnhautebourg (Oct 5, 2011)

WouldaShoulda said:


> I'm borrowing that!! :icon_cheers:


I'm glad someone else noticed that--that quote is practically Nabokovian.


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## P Hudson (Jul 19, 2008)

Thoughts on shoes and clothing. 

IMO--and speaking generally-- the darker the shoe, the more formal it is. Trad, again speaking generally, reserves truly formal wear for formal events. That is why I don't wear black shoes--unless I'm getting married. As everyone here has heard countless times, the waspy trads wore white shoes, and worked at "white shoe" firms. This eventually gave way to broader admissions and brown shoes. Black shoes were for immigrants. Of course, in a world of basketball shoes, those are relatively meaningless distinctions.

I don't mean to endorse anybody's social condescension, but this is a TNSIL forum, and this is a slice of TNSIL history.

So the question is, how do we absorb our current environment into our trad sensibilities. I like dirty bucks, don't wear black shoes for the most part, and generally wear khakis or gray flannels. I have no problem with wearing white or dirty bucks with flannels, and no problem wearing brown or cordovan pennys with stone-colored khakis.

And I think the OP was saying that a general "rule" exists which has some utility but doesn't really fit a Trad ethos. But in the real days of TNSIL, they were breaking almost all the rules.


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## zzdocxx (Sep 26, 2011)

P Hudson said:


> As everyone here has heard countless times, the waspy trads wore white shoes, and worked at "white shoe" firms. This eventually gave way to broader admissions and brown shoes. Black shoes were for immigrants.


Interesting, in what time period did that happen?

Just curious.


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## Bjorn (May 2, 2010)

P Hudson said:


> Thoughts on shoes and clothing.
> 
> IMO--and speaking generally-- the darker the shoe, the more formal it is. Trad, again speaking generally, reserves truly formal wear for formal events. That is why I don't wear black shoes--unless I'm getting married. As everyone here has heard countless times, the waspy trads wore white shoes, and worked at "white shoe" firms. This eventually gave way to broader admissions and brown shoes. Black shoes were for immigrants. Of course, in a world of basketball shoes, those are relatively meaningless distinctions.
> 
> ...


But did they wear there white bucks to work or are the firms simply named after their propensity to wear white bucks on holidays? Makes a huge difference IMO. And did they wear their shoes lighter than their trousers?

I have no problem with people wearing pajamas and kilim slippers at home but I resist the idea that this, or light shoe/spectator shoe wearing during the weekends, has any impact on what is to be considered 'stylish' to wear on the street or in the office.

Can the rule no shoes lighter than the trousers be discarded without looking to what the British wear? Light shoes with dark trousers are gaudy and inelegant, IMO.

I like wearing brown shoes but there comes a point when the shoe gets so light it separates from the rest, and that's just bad. If you want to wear brighter shoes, wear brighter trousers. The line between Dandy and vulgar is thin in this area, and it takes a lot of wardrobe to set up a white shoe nicely so it doesn't look out of place. Primarily, really light bright trousers.

Anyone can flaunt a rule but this is one I think to break successfully is hard. If done with a lot of trad gear, could move one firmly into the 'costume' area. Again, IMO.


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## P Hudson (Jul 19, 2008)

zzdocxx said:


> Interesting, in what time period did that happen?
> 
> Just curious.


This is from "I'm the Face", B-side of the first single (1964) by a group called The High Numbers. They had more success after they changed their name to the Who.

"I wear ivy league jackets, white buckskin shoes,
I wear ivy league jackets, white buckskin shoes,
So many tickets down the scene honey,
They're like to blow a fuse."

Not that this answers your question. I'm afraid I'll have to do some digging.



Bjorn said:


> But did they wear there white bucks to work or are the firms simply named after their propensity to wear white bucks on holidays? Makes a huge difference IMO. And did they wear their shoes lighter than their trousers?
> 
> I have no problem with people wearing pajamas and kilim slippers at home but I resist the idea that this, or light shoe/spectator shoe wearing during the weekends, has any impact on what is to be considered 'stylish' to wear on the street or in the office.


This is IMO the highwater mark of trad: Princeton, 1938. This is from a Life article that referred to the clothing as a "uniform". The funny bit in the lower left corner was a square inset focussed on footwear, namely the socks and a pair of white shoes (priced at $10 iirc).


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## P Hudson (Jul 19, 2008)

An interesting contribution comes from our own Patrick in his thread, The Black Loafer. https://askandyaboutclothes.com/community/showthread.php?94542-The-Black-Loafer

His OP was picked up and expanded here: https://theivyleaguelook.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/shoe.html

Another shot of white bucks with flannels can be found here: https://www.ivy-style.com/how-the-white-shoe-law-firm-got-its-name.html


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## Orsini (Apr 24, 2007)

Using an SA for "style" guidance? When did that get to be a good idea?


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