The tip – Wipe off rain on the pants

This may sound like a quite unorthodox tip, but sometimes you need to do things a bit different. We talk about wiping of raindrops from the shoes on the pants, which prevents the formation of water spots.

When the rain pours down a bit more easily, which often is the case, you often get the effect that rain drops are formed on top of the leather, if the shoes have been treated properly with shoe cream and polish. The toe which is usually polished more thoroughly there’s less risk of the water penetrates into the leather, but on the rest of the shoe it usually slowly enters into the material if the drips are left. Therefore, it can be helpful to occasionally wipe off the top of the shoes towards the back of the pants leg at the calf/back of the knee, especially important when you come inside, get on the bus, or similar, simply when you step in from the rain. It’s due to the fact that when the water droplets remain in the same place for a longer time that the risk of this type of water marks are higher. One doesn’t need to wipe them especially careful really, you just need to wipe the water a bit so that it doesn’t remain stationary in the same place over time.

On these shoes from Vass (also top picture) you can see this type of stains clear, after that I didn’t wipe away the raindrops on the inside of the shoes and then they’d been absorbed by the leather. This museum calf leather from the Italian tannery Bonaudo is also a leather that proved to be the quite sensitive to these types of stains. It’s really nice and supple in general, but has this disadvantage.

If this is done with a pair of otherwise clean shoes that just got some rain on them the only thing that happens with the pants is that they get a little damp, but must raining quite hard and be made several times if it really should be noticed. You have to use common sense, with shoes with muddy at sole edges and perhaps also uppers this may not be recommended, but many of us are living in the city and don’t have dirty shoes in general. One might be a bit careful if you wear very light colored trousers and have darker shoes, since shoe cream can come off a little bit if one has bad luck. There’s also no point to do this when it rains so much that they becomes soaked through.

The water stains formed when the drops have been on the leather for a while often becomes like small, slightly raised spots. They can be treated with renovateur or Bick 4 and shoe cream and get a lot better, but it’s not unusual that they don’t go away completely. How sensitive the calf leather is for this type of stain formation also depends a lot on the type of leather, and it can differ greatly between tanneries.
Then you can of course also see this kind of water stains as patina, and as long as they don’t become too obvious, it’s rarely something that affects your shoes too badly.

A shoe with quite severe spots from wain drops.

Here’s a pair of Saint Crispin’s shoes in so-called shrunken calf leather, with unusually heavy rain drip stains where the leather really changed in color, which does not usually happen. The pictures: StyleForum