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We all have them.
Shoes you can love. Whether they’re Carrie Bradshaw chic or Sinead O’Connor functional, there’s a pair in all of our lives – waiting like a faithful pet at the door, leash in mouth. They have taken the shape of our feet and examining them will tell you whether you walk on your heel or your toes, whether you favor one leg over the other and whether you’re a “lifter” or a “scuffer”. We take them off and leave them as they sit, ready to slip back on; motions our feet make instinctively and habitually. Like going home.
These shoes are loafers. Tthey make no attempt to recondition your arch, enhance your calf, give you air-ability. They won’t help you make a free throw or get you through the last mile of the Boston Marathon. If a pair of spike Kenneth Coles are a Doberman, loafers are hound dogs … built for comfort and not speed. And in this world … everyone needs a pair of loafers, I think. If for nothing else, for the notion of them.
Just a little trivia:
In the early 1930s Esquire magazine photographed a dairy farmer in Norway who was wearing a pair of lace-less, slip-on shoes while working with cattle in a holding pen called a “loafing area”. The Spaulding family of New England started making comfortable, leather slip on shoes based on those Esquire photographs few years later – naming them, naturally, loafers.
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