My dad has worn socks with sandals every summer since, give or take, 1994. I’m talking plain socks, the ones your parents wore in the eighties and before them dug out of the clearance bins to wear when they went hiking. White sports socks shoved into tan or brown leather sandals. Taken to barbecues and garden centres and — judging by the dirty look he shot me across the table — my cousin’s wedding last July.
For most of my life this has been grounds for mild family humiliation. Mum used to hide his nicer sandals before engagements.
I spent my teens muttering excuses about not knowing who he was whenever we ran into him at school fetes.
So believe me when I say I did not start this investigation neutral. I came at it with roughly thirty years of secondhand embarrassment and a sincere belief that socks with sandals were one of the very few clothing combinations that could never, under any circumstances, be made cool. And then I actually looked into it, and it turns out I was completely wrong. And not just wrong, but mad about it.
The rule I was told but never asked about
Look, here’s the issue with all of the fashion rules you grow up absorbing without question: you never stop to think about their origin, you just accept them as truth. Somewhere between the school playground and adulthood I internalised that socks with sandals meant one thing, dads abroad on holiday, and dads abroad on holiday meant unfashionable, period. It wasn’t really the socks or sandals on their own; individually they’re totally fine, but together they were Dad, and Dad meant staying at home and definitely not caring how you looked. Fashionableness wasn’t the point, carelessness was.
I internalised this message right up until my friend Priya rocked up to a barbecue in Berlin two summers ago with sandals, socks and a sureness about her appearance that gave me existential style envy. “Why does Priya look amazing in socks and sandals,” I remember thinking to my slowly curdling Malliardised beer, “when Dad wears the exact same thing and looks like Dad wearing socks and sandals.”
Priya’s sartorial triumph was the crack in the foundation. If socks and sandals truly were as universal an offence as I’d been told they were — if stepping into the same combination was an irredeemable fashion sin regardless of context, pairings or person wearing them — Priya should’ve looked like every bad booking my dad ever made at that wedding. She didn’t. Either socks and sandals had never actually been about socks and sandals at all, or there was something else going on that I hadn’t quite picked up on. You know, besides literally writing sixteen hundred words about a problem other people solve by shrugging and moving on.
What I’ve realised since spending way too much time thinking about sandals touching socks instead of bare feet is that socks + sandals wasn’t actually the rule. It was a proxy for a whole range of judgements about how much effort the wearer was putting in, whether they’d considered the setting they were wearing something in, and (perhaps worst of all) if they were dressing with awareness of what decade it actually was. Dad wasn’t deviant for rocking socks with sandals. He was unwittingly dressing exactly how people wore sandals in the seventies and eighties: sincerely, practically and with absolutely zero trace of irony at a time when that specific combination had been declared hopelessly unfashionable for well over twenty years. Priya hadn’t contravened a rule. She was wearing an aesthetic that fashion had already decided was cool (“gender neutral!”) and hitting every marker of intentionality from sandal shape to socks as a texture and proportion decision, rather than strictly a neutrality of practicality.
What I tried doing and why it immediately backfired
Naturally, I did not just sit down and think about sandals all day. I went out and bought a pair myself and took myself off to work to test the theory out. Birkenstocks, the two straps across the foot ones, in a beige I was told was neutral and versatile but which was actually just beige. Black ribbed socks pulled up to my knee with them and headed out to see if I could reproduce my friend Priya’sごちそうさま-esque cocktail of socks + sandals style without actually copying her (we agreed that would be weird) and felt cooler than I had any right to.
My colleague Femi spotted me half an hour later next to the coffee machine and asked if I’d gone skinny dipping in the office winter garden and lost my socks because he genuinely didn’t understand whether what I was doing was a fashion thing or because my feet were cold. Which, objectively, is probably the single nicest thing anyone’s ever said about one of my outfits. He was not being rude, he honestly wanted to know if I was wearing socks as a style choice or because I wasn’t sure if the air conditioning was broken again. The whole look, as presented to him, read as unintentional rather than attempted, and if I’m being entirely honest with myself that probably was the issue. Reviving a supposedly taboo style combo requires you to wear it like you mean it; mess that balance up and even the coolest sneakers will look tossed together.
Honestly, it took me staring directly at Priya’s sandals versus mine to work out where I’d gone wrong that day. But once I did it all came down to a series of boring, practical decisions nobody wants to read about because they’re not actually very glamorous. The socks have to fit the sandal they’re worn with, first and foremost. Mine were too long, ending in a bunch rather than pulled taut which always reads as forgetting rather than choosing. Priya’s stopped just above the ankle bone in a way that looked deliberately cropped. The sandals themselves are important too. Bulky sandals with structure look like they were made to wear socks with. Slip sandals with no real shape have zero positive associations with socks and look like you’ve slid them on over bare feet because you couldn’t be arsed dealing with socks. And then there’s colour. Which I failed on so hard and laughed about so bitterly with Femi that it didn’t occur to me until much later. Black socks on beige sandals screamed “I made no effort to coordinate these things” to my coworker whereas something bolder, or at least more obviously intentional, would have leant towards intention. I tried again, a fortnight later with better colour-matching and a chunkier sandal I already owned, and the difference was night and day, even to my informal eye. (Orlaochrana saw photos and told me “okay that one is good, what happened to the other sandals,” which is high praise from someone who would literally tell me I looked like a baby Satan if she thought I did.)
Context ended up mattering way more than the rule itself ever did
That might have been the biggest revelation of all, more enlightening than actually pulling together and wearing things myself. Context matters enormously. I can accept socks with sandals as a styling choice when we’re talking about city streets or gigs because the sandal itself doesn’t come loaded with the same set of expectations about what it’s “for” that come with a barbecue, a swimming pool or — gods help us— the beach. Sandals at the beach are function. Sandals at a barbecue, even in a city park, are function you don’t mind wearing while you look at someone else’s burgers cook. Sandals at night out or in an office you know is fashion-forward can veer wholly into aesthetic territory, and socks with said sandals largely land in that “intentional” pile.
Age matters. Geography matters. I say that as someone who spent a long time thinking my dad didn’t have a point before realising that version 2023 of him wearing socks with sandals in public probably does, same as me. The precise combination mocked as “trying too hard” on someone who by all indications cares what’s trendy looks wholly sincere on my dad, who hasn’t updated his look since circa 1994 because sandal+socks was never “trendy” to him. He just wore them. There’s an argument to be made—and this is not an argument I expected to come to, let me tell you—and it’s probably genuinely okay if Dad continues wearing those sandals with those socks wherever he wants. Them wearing them unironically for thirty years does kind of feel like it triumphs over whatever snap decision British fashion editors made circa.2003 declared them unacceptable.
Something else that didn’t occur to me until I actually sat down and researched it, which feels like a ridiculous thing to say about something I’ve basically built a Twitter thread around, is socks with sandals might never have been “a thing” for loads of people in the same way it was for me. It stuck in Britain and America particularly strongly thanks to the stylepress treating it with endless, bait-hooked snark but was completely geographically isolated in itsCodeAt the time if you asked someone in Japan or Sweden if socks with sandals were cool they’d probably have looked at you like you had three eyes. They still might. Scandinavian dress has quietly worn chunky sandals with socks for years without making a huge deal about it because, generally speaking, their entire approach to dressing well revolves around texture and practicality first rather than how “on trend” you are. Remove that critical piece of the judgement and “socks with sandals” stops being a hard-and-fast rule and starts looking more like my local equivalent deciding things nobody asked us cared about deeply, absolutely certain those decisions were global.
So what am I left with after all of this?
Sandals toned way down, both figuratively and with how often I intend to wear mine I guess? We’ve come full circle, me and my poorly researched opinions on footwear. I’m okay with it, which is maybe the last place I thought I’d end up. Not okay with it all the time; I don’t think I could ever wear the exact same thing my dad does and feel confident about it. But okay with the idea of it, comfortable enough in my discovery that something I’d memorably hated as a child based on one very mild source can be made acceptable through sheer will, texture and a better pair of socks. I owe Dad a half-apology, I think. At least thirty years of him having to hide his nicer sandals and me avoiding family functions he wore those specific brown ones to. Half because I’m still never borrowing those sandals, but that’s perks of being right.
