Fall 2006 Trendspotting: White Shoes

Last winter, we thought it was merely a few ironists who revived the white shoe. We saw them in their check pants and their leisure jackets, and we thought that they wanted to look like Florida retirees as a kind of camp thing. They were the kind of people who boasted about hilarious thrift store finds at V2 (actually it’s Value Village, a very large chain of Canadian “thrift stores”, but V2 has a more stylish ring to it).
Then we started to see the shoes over the summer in troubling numbers: white loafers with linen suits, white loafers with jeans and pinstripe jackets, white loafers with really nice dark suits-and we realized it wasn’t ironic at all. It was sad. People seem to be thinking that the retiree shoe is a cleaver and normal summer accoutrement.
Now, the unthinkable has happened: White shoes are being matched in runway shows with winter clothing, such as navy suits.
Note that the winter white shoe is lace-up, not a loafer, so it is not quite as ugly (we said quite). But note too that we find shoes in any configuration to be startling. We might tolerate a white lace-up bucks with white linen suits, maybe in say, Panama, but who wears all-white ensembles to formal events besides bridezillas.

White shoes with any dark color look too flashy and rather sleazy-their gangster (not ‘gangsta’) connotation is just too strong. And the white loafer-particularly the pointy variety of recent fashion, with stitching around the vamp-is simply put an abomination. As Nancy Reagan once said, “Just say no”, in this case to this trend.