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That leather shoes can stretch is something most people are aware of, but how much they actually do so is far less straightforward. A key reason for this is that leather doesn’t stretch according to any fixed rule, but instead adapts to the forces it’s exposed to. In practice, this means that pressure from the foot is one of the most decisive factors in how a shoe will change over time.
A common suggestion to asses the fit of a shoe, and something that many people use regularly, is about placing a finger between the heel of the foot and the inside back of the shoe. But the info you get from this is more or less useless and doesn’t give any relevant information. Here’s why.
This article is as much for customers as it’s for retailers and brands, who in too many cases overcomplicate the process of measuring feet. Given the few data points one have to work with when selling shoes online, it’s important that you get the ones you have exactly right. The use of pencils, papers, outlines and so on are only adding steps that can go wrong. Here’s how one should do it.
Shoes have gone from something that most ordered from a local cordwainer in versions of relatively standard styles, past a segment where styles were perhaps more limited but Ready to Wear shoes were kept in loads of different lasts and widths that customers could try on, up to today’s situation where there is a huge selection of styles but fit-wise more and more streamlined to fit the most common feet “ok”, instead of fitting some feet great. Here’s how it all evolved.
Many people think that a shoe’s toe spring, the height of the tip of the toe above the ground, and the heel height only affect how the shoe feels when walking and its appearance. But it also has a bearing on how much the shoe needs to be bent when walking, which can ultimately affect how prominent the creases becomes. I’ll explain this more in detail, and delve deeper into these topics.
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The fact that how shoes fit affects how shoes crease is sort of common knowledge among shoe interested. However, it’s common to see misconceptions where people confuse excess creasing due to fit issues with pronounced creasing due to the properties of the leather or because of bad leather quality. Here I try to pin out the differences.
Some think boots in general are the most comfortable footwear there is, while many others dislike them especially for creating discomfort around the ankles and lower leg. For the latter group of people, here’s a simple, logic yet still not commonly used solution for how to make the shaft of lace-up boots more comfortable: skip lacing the last pair of eyelets.
Buying shoes online from a maker one haven’t tried before is a challenge, and internet is full of size guides and questions and answers on sizing. Grayle is a new website that wants to be the one stop solution for all shoe sizing questions, by building the world’s largest database on shoe fit.
The fact that leather shoes stretch is something that most people learn when they are children. In what way and how much they stretch, however, is another matter, and not something for which there is a fixed formula. There are lots of different aspects that affect how much or how little a shoe stretches, here I go through some of them.
Most people know about removable insoles, heel grips, tongue pads etc. to fix various fit issues, what some might not think about though is that if you go to a good cobbler you can have fix the same issues in an even nicer looking and better way. Here I highlight a number of fit modifications that cobblers can do. It’s very common that RTW shoes does not fit perfectly, but in many cases the modifications below can make it really good.
