How to shop for…shoes

Some things you might not think about

It may seem elementary and perhaps a bit presumptuous to write a post about how to buy shoes — I’m sure you’ve all bought plenty of shoes before and been just fine. But in my lifetime of shopping and amassing many shoes (and then paring back down again), I’ve learned a few things that now guide me whenever I’m buying footwear.

For any amount of walking, no hard leather soles

In dense cities, we all walk a lot. Even if we drive from place to place (or catch Lyfts or take mass transit), there is an increased amount of actual walking than in places that are truly car-oriented. I learned this moving from Florida to Italy, bringing with me many beautiful leather-soled loafers and boots and stomping all over those cobbled streets and miles across Milan.

Never in my life did I have so many blisters and eventually corns on my toes (ultra-sensitive hard callouses), to the point that I was buying all the gel insoles and bandages to keep my feet from incredible pain.

For a long time I looked down on rubber-soled shoes, either because they weren’t as elegant as leather-soled, or because I perceived them as lesser quality. Those are both mostly subjective assessments, and what I learned through trial was that for any decent…