PROLOGUE: ASOS
Initially reticent to re-board the boat shoe trend, I began last March with these shiny half loafers/half deck shoes from ASOS. I ended up wearing them all spring, but also wanted something a bit dressed down and de-glossed, although still black and not brown, to better avoid looking like my 6th grade suburban self.
When it comes to boat shoes I’m just not on board with visible branding, so that ruled out Sperry and its boastful little boat-stamps, as well as Parabot, Rogues Gallery, and Sebago and their fabric heel tag/flags.
CHAPTER 1: QUODDY
By early May, I thus wound up at Quoddy and their custom-order options and accompanying six week waiting times. I figured I’d finally have my summer shoes by mid/late June which is technically when true summer begins, and as a bonus, I’d always suspected I had truncated but wide feet and so got to order my boat shoes not in a standard D width but E.
Nine-instead-of-six weeks after early May, the made-just-for-me Quoddy boat shoes washed up on my battered city shores.
I don’t know if it was their inherent style or the fact that I’d ordered them in the wider E size, but they seemed bizarrely shaped and bloated somehow, and the leather was awfully injured-looking, and struck me not so much as thin, taut shoe leather, but as puffy foamed rubber or something.
With $235 plus the weight of all my summer-shoe dreams weighing on them, it took me minutes instead of the usual hours/days to decide to return them for a refund.
Summer was half over and I was drowning in disappointment. Was it worth pinning my hopes on a pair of black rescue-boat shoes? Or should I just dead man’s float until next spring and start all over?
CHAPTER 2: LANDS END CANVAS
Having worn in my black and buffed ASOS pair to an even more beloved place in my heart during my wait for Quoddy, and then spotting Joel Goodsen on TV dicking around his driveway in a pair of short cut-offs and banal brown, white-soled boat shoes, I re-set my course.
With the visual search engine at ShopStyle.com as my skipper, I sailed toward Lands End’s new hipped-up Canvas branded line, and ordered their chestnut brown boat shoes marked down from $80 to $60 and waited but two days for them to arrive in two different sizes so I could pick which fit best.
When they did, I wasn’t sure if they looked cheap or not, but I was certain their laces didn’t match their leather well enough. Or that the two I had ordered were the right size, so I ordered a third, returned the smallest and the largest, and kept the median 8.5s.
But only as a back-up plan. (Why, after everything I already went through, would I make things easy for myself now?)
CHAPTER 3: QUODDY BY WAY OF O’CONNELLS
Because earlier this year I had seen Ryan at YouHaveBrokenTheInternet order a pair of the Quoddys – but in brown instead of black, and with a white sole, and from O’Connells in NY which gloriously didn’t require agonizing wait times (as long as you were down with the white soles, which, thanks to Risky Business, I now completely was). And I just wanted to be sure if Quoddy was or was not an option for me in my boat shoe adventures.
I considered forgoing the wider E style again for a less bloated-looking D, but, perhaps out of self-sabotage, I again went wide, and when the second summer Quoddys arrived the leather and laces did look a little bit better than my back-up Lands End pair, but with three lace holes instead of two, they seemed trickier to slip right into and out of. Which, to me, is the most super of the boat shoe’s powers.
And the real stickler to me about the brown Quoddys was: They looked handsome and heritage-y and very now. But what I’d ended up really wanting, I realized, was something really dated and Dad-ish. Duh.
And so back went the second Quoddys.
And out into the light of a summer Friday night went the Lands Ends.
EPILOGUE
Until, after wearing them out to dinner, I realized they were sadly too small and needed to be replaced by the exact same style, just a half/size larger.
I’m waiting for those shoes to arrive, but I have to say, wearing the Lands Ends for even an hour (not pictured) stretches and shines the leather in a way that instantly rids them of whatever “patina of cheap” I worried if they initially had, and the laces darken and soften and pair better with the leather of the shoes too.
For $80 (the Lands End sale just ended, natch), and after all my misadventures, they’re remarkably unremarkable. Just like the ones I had in 1988, and just like Joel’s.
Which means they’re way, way, way beyond perfect.
Do they warrant the longest Treasury entry in history? Probably not. But what in fashion is ever truly warranted?
