Of loafers and roadsters

and J-Class 6s

Ideogram.ai

I have long pondered the beauty of loafers and its causes. By loafers here I primarily mean penny loafers, though moccasins and some boat shoes are sometimes subject to the same rules. The first thing to recognise is that loafers, when really beautiful, cause a sense of longing akin to a dull pain in the viewer. This pain has some of the properties of a resonance, an amplified buzz caused by the exact match between the proportions of two vibrating objects, here the loafer and the nervous system of the viewer.

Consider penny loafer vibrations as a function of plug length, i.e. the distance between the toe and the saddle, which is the bit where you put the penny. A very short nose brings to mind feminine loafers of the ‘seventies, typically in patent leather, intended to convey a potentially kinky nerdiness. On a man, such proportions would be wrong, show too much bony foot and suggest a mutant court shoe fit only for movie villains with a British accent. At the other extreme, a very long nose misses the point of loafers entirely, which is their tortured relationship with slippers. The saddle is now in the wrong place, and putting a penny in there, up near the throat so to speak, would look ridiculous, since what we have now is a slip-on, not a loafer.

Therefore there must exist somewhere between these two values a perfect proportion which, when achieved, can break hearts. To determine its position, it is important here to understand that penny loafers are unique among men’s shoes in being overtly cute. Loafers make feet look small, and they have something babyish about them. Loafers are intrinsically young shoes, and luxurious ones can have a Dorian Gray quality when worn by an older man, as if in some attic a pair of hideously deformed, barely recognisable slip ons were coming apart at the seams. Expensive loafers, suggestive of age and wealth, though often beautiful, accentuate this and lack the sincerity and freshness of the cheap ones.

What makes the search for the perfect loafer a truly romantic, and therefore doomed, quest is the fact that the purchase of a pair of shoes is akin to the taming of a wild animal. The magnificent loafer sitting in a shoemaker’s window is in its native habitat, filled to capacity by a cedarwood shoe tree, surrounded by its peers, in an atmosphere fragranced by leather and dubbin. The moment you buy it and wear it, it begins its long journey towards the repulsiveness of secondhand shoes, darkened inside by a sweaty footprint, widened by the daily pressure of your weight, and scuffed by a thousand forgotten blows.

I mentioned the pain caused by a perfect loafer. Very few objects do that. In my experience the only ones that do are modestly sized wooden sloops of a bygone age, and some sports cars. All three represent eternal youth. Anyone who can look at a 6-metre J class boat built between the wars and not feel some ache behind the knees is built from sterner stuff than me. More accessibly, roadsters do it as well. The original Miata hit that pressure point perfectly. It is worth noting that it was modeled on the Lotus Elan, which, in comparison to the Miata, like all British things of that period, looked like it had lacked protein at some important stage of development.

J-Class boats are straightforwardly derived from plainer, fatter sloops by inbreeding. All roadsters descend from the 1950 Ferrari 166 Barchetta styled by Touring. Loafers have a common ancestor, the mythical Norwegian (hence Weejun) slip-on nowhere to be seen these days. Boats, roadsters and loafers have one obvious thing in common: you climb into them to go places. When you next drive a roadster, wear loafers or steer a 1930s sloop, think of yourself as a foot and try not to look like one to others.