“It’s barbaric.” Nadia said. Glasses of Rioja in our hands, sitting opposite each other at Nadia’s kitchen table about this woman Nadia had seen through the window of a café on Marchmont Street wearing black opaques and leather sandals like it wasn’t the least bit scandalous. Not Gladiator sandals with a chunky sandal-shoe sole that could, if you squinted hard enough, pass as some sort of shoe-boot hybrid. Thin strapped sandals. With tights. In September.
“I think it looks nice,” I said.
She gave me look that communicated I had just told her I put milk in my coffee before the water.
We’d been talking about this for forty minutes by the time Nadia’s boyfriend Dom wandered downstairs, saw the two of us silently judging each other over a phone screenshot of a stranger’s ankles, and asked, “is this still about the sandals thing?” as if he’d listened to both sides give their opening arguments and had his own opinions but didn’t really need to share them with anyone.
But here’s the thing. I’ve thought about this more than sufficiently since that night, going beyond merely basking in the smug glow of winning a friendly argument where wine was on the menu, and while I still fundamentally believe Nadia was wrong, I also think the tights-with-sandals debate isn’t really about sandals or tights at all. It’s about whether you believe clothes have to make practical sense as a unit, like how a sentence needs a verb, or whether they only need to make the person wearing them feel like the best version of themselves that morning. Nadia falls into the former category. I fall into the latter. We would never agree on this.
Arguments, actual vs strawman
For the record: I understand and agree with every counterpoint Nadia made that night, because despite where this article is headed, she made actually good points. The argument against wearing tights with sandals, laid out by Nadia with the sort of conviction only someone who’s given the exact same speech dozens of times, at friend’s dinner parties across the years, can have: sandals are there to show off your feet. Tights are there to cover up your legs. Put them together and you’ve got a cocktail of contention as strongly blended as wearing a bikini topped with a sweater, or ordering a decaf latte. Two items trying to have a shouting match up and down your legs.
It’s honestly not a bad argument. I just disagree with it when you apply actual reality to what sandals and tights are both doing protecting your legs from British weather, rather than getting hung up on what each item was “intended” to be worn with.
Because let me tell you what I’ve learnt about tights and sandals after almost accidentally wearing the combination around eleven or twelve times over three autumns: it never looks accidental when you do it on purpose. Black sheer tights, or something fine, like a 40 denier, with a leather sandal that actually looks built like a shoe. Has a defined sole, a thick enough strap. It looks intentional. It looks like you owned both pieces separately and thought about putting them together. It’s the thick opaques with the rubber Croc sandal – essentially beach shoes with a sweater tied around your calves – that looks like a decision your legs made for you while you were still asleep. That looks like a mistake. When tights and sandals clash it’s a texture issue more than a rules issue. Beefy wool knit tights want boots. Thin sandals want thin tights over them. It’s not that they can’t wear each other, it’s that most people who try are reaching for the wrong thickness.
Priya, my friend who teaches in a school and therefore has to assess these kinds of things functionally as opposed to stylistically for about nine months of the year told me something along these lines when I pinged her the debate later that week, partly looking for support and partly just interested in another take. She likes wearing sheer tights with flat sandals until it actually feels like you need boots, because the alternative is bare legs, and bare legs, she told me, from a place of living in Scotland since she was born, is just madness that nobody is yelling about on principle. Nobody’s going around saying “YOUCANNTAKEMYLEGSBAREINSEPTEMBERTHAT’SWHATSBARBARIC.”
That’s the part I keep revisiting. Nobody ever gets mad about something because it logically makes sense or doesn’t. If logic were all it took to be divisive about women’s clothes, going out with bare legs and a spring dress but no tights when it’s 11 degrees out would get shouted at like tights with sandals, and it doesn’t, because no one cares enough to say anything other than “she must have cold arms” or “she won’t be stopped outside long”. Nobody critiques bare legs and a spring dress because it’s seen as a compromise with the weather, not an outfit choice. The second pants touch sandals it’s seen as a deliberate decision by the wearer, and suddenly that decision can be judged.
Where I landed, and what I had to concede
I say all that to preface my reluctance to dive into this battle too zealously on behalf of Team Sandals With Tights. I want to be fair because my entire ego was riding on being the person on the right side of this argument. But I will cop to wearing tights and sandals once myself a few years back that I will never, ever live down, and would be lying to myself (and you) if I didn’t address straight up.
We were at a wedding. My cousin’s wedding. It was in the south, in a marquee out near Guildford. I wore thick black tights. Like, opaque-as-leggings-if-we’re-being-honest tights, with gold strappy heeled sandals I’d bought specifically for the wedding God knows why and refused to be deterred by the fact that it was, indeed, October. My Aunt Rosalind, the champion eyebrow-liker over generations of Warren women, greeted me at the church with “you’ve got your winter legs on with your summer shoes love, are you cold or is that the look?” and truth be told, I had no defence. Yes, I was cold. Yes that was the look. Neither of those solved the problems my outfit had presented. To herself, at least.
I’m willing to bet that’s the look Nadia saw when I told her about this too. Thick tights doing one thing. Sandals doing the opposite. Summer shoes, winter legs. One literally keeping your legs warm, and one that just isn’t suitable for the weather at all. That? I’ll agree to that. That looks like a refusal to accept Autumn exists.
But there’s a difference between that outfit and what I was championing at Nadia’s knees months ago, and it’s about whether or not your choices match up in terms of intention and fabric weight, rather than sandals touching pants. Sheer or thin enough tights that they read as covering your legs, not replacing them. Structured enough sandals that they look designed to be shoes, not flip flops you threw on in your pajamas. If you hit that balance – no thicker tights, no sandals that look like they’d fall apart if it rains – the whole look works. Step outside that and you start crossing into what Aunt Rosalind saw the second she saw me that day and wasn’t above sharing in front of the entire congregation.
Why we keep fighting about it
The thing I actually can’t get over is how this blend seam argues about tights with boots, or bare legs with sandals. Those both make sense. They don’t overlap or cause anyone issues. Tights and sandals falls into this grey area where they can be worn with either or neither of those two options and THAT is what causes people stress, I think. It sits in fashion’s roughest shoulder season; that between-times when it’s no longer sunny enough for sandals but not cold enough for boots and everyone knows it. Any outfit choice we make in that twilight stretch of weather between January and April or September and November is up for increased scrutiny simply because there’s no hard weather rules defending our choices. Nobody questions you for a parka in December. Everybody has subtle tights with sandals opinions.
I also think there’s a very clear age gap on this issue that we didn’t get into at the kitchen table, but I noticed afterwards. My mum thinks tights with sandals is done wrong, period. Full stop. Like how she thinks white pants after Labour Day are a sin, i.e. accepts these rules as given and moves on with her life. Millennials I know, including my coworker Femi, wear the combination all the time and never think twice because the cultural touchstones that influenced how they dressed growing up, think: that bigearly aughts revival of tights with sandals on every runway and style.com roundup from 2006 forward taught them that wearing both at once was normal, not rebellious before they were old enough to question whether rules should be questioned at all. Ask Femi whether it’s problematic and she’ll look at you like you’re the weird one. Asking her if trainers were okay in the office is how she remembers fashion conversations finishing up in her teens. To her, this isn’t a debate that needs hashing over drinks and snacks, it’s Tuesday.
So to answer the question. Should you wear tights with sandals? Yes. No questions. Go bother someone who doesn’t own sandals about that “problem”.
But! And this is crucial: it only looks good if you do it properly. Sheer tights with structured sandals, not flimsy ones. Thick tights with boots. If you fall out of that mantra you run the risk of Aunt Rosalind interrogation come Sunday service. It’s the price you pay for outfitting yourself with actual intention rather than letting life select your clothes for you. Nadia maintains her stance, incidentally. I texted her a draft of this as I was writing and her response was just one word.
“No.”
