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This is a topic that I constantly get questions about: how much the gap at the lacing should be on oxford shoes. There are obviously individual differences, but there are guidelines that I and many others agree on.
Most people, me included, prefer to use some kind of cloth to apply shoe cream when shoes are being polished, and possibly take an application brush for the space between the sole edge and the upper. In the case of embossed grain leather, however, there are great advantages of using the brush on the entire shoe.
One often talk about the importance of shoe trees, that shoes shouldn’t stand close to radiators, and other things about how they are stored. One thing that rarely is reflected over is which kind of shelf the shoes stand on, which may be quite significant.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard or read things like “the shoes hurt like hell for a week, but now they are really comfortable.” Classic quality shoes, which are more or less entirely made in leather, shouldn’t be used fully directly, both the shoes and especially the feet will feel much better if they are broken in carefully.
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.
Articles continued:
Heel slippage when walking is one of the more common problems people experience with new shoes. It can be caused by several different things, but it’s not always easy to know which. Here’s a list of the most common reasons, and the solutions that exists – or in some cases don’t exist.
A nice thing with quality of shoes is that they have insoles of leather that allows the feet to breathe in a good way. This feature can be drastically reduced if you use removable insoles with different often synthetic materials that don’t breathe, and which also can clog the pores of the insole and make the leather dry out and crack.
I’ve written about this before in other shoe care articles, that it’s good to let wet shoes dry lying on the side to speed up the drying process and allow the entire shoe to be aired. Recently I became aware of what can happen if you don’t do this, when one of my bespoke pairs from Janne Melkersson was used in rain and were left standing as usual, and ended up with a proper formation of mildew on the sole.
Even though most (hopefully) take out and put in shoe trees every day, many people use the wrong technique when this is done, which can make it unnecessarily complicated. Here I show how this is done best to save both yourself and the shoes trouble.
The subject of stretching shoes has been featured several times here on the blog, it’s really the only way to make small shoes larger. Here’s a tip on how to take care of the shoe stretching yourself.
