Your Sole Option

Get a rise out of this: the ubiquitous wedges and platform soles that have permeated women's shoe fashions have finally crept back into men's shoes.


Granted, we're not talking skyline elevations here (well, except for Prada, but more on that later), but in menswear, subtler changes make bigger news. While heels have swung on the fashion pendulum radically over the past decade, wedge and crepe soles haven't been seen so much since the last decade. I personally held on to a pair of Jil Sander crepe-soled wedge shoes from the period when Truzzardi 1911's Milan Vukmirovic was briefly its creative director because I loved the sole. This season, in part because of the ubiquity of Red Wing shoes with their contrast wedge soles (below), in part because it's just the right to revisit since fashion is nothing if not cyclical, crepe soles are noticeably looking both fresh and fun again.

Right now they're just making their way into the fashion mainstream, but you can find introductory salvos everywhere. Rick Owens has used the heavier wedged crepe soles to anchor the bottom-heavy silhouettes he's championed for the past few years. In more mainstream men's fashion, heritage brand Red Wing employ the look in their classic boots and have even reissued their vintage Postman series this past year (above, in chukka and laceup options), a style that more forward Japanese brands had already reprised on their own for several seasons, in lieu of the original . The Japanese have been adding heavier lug soles to pretty much whatever they can get their trendy little hands on, while British footwear brand Grenson has updated their old-school wingtips with fresh Vibram soles (top image). Creepers, edgy classics that they are, have always had the higher crepe sole, and as such can be an easy way to sneak into the trend. And this year, Prada (below) scales new heights with its hyper-emphasized Spring shoe collections, going for f*ed up platforms-cum-woven-espadrille soles at elevations not seen since ravers and club kids used to tower around with them in decades past.


It's hard not to notice the trend when you see so many iterations of the the style permeating the fashion landscape. Take the cue and elevate your own wardrobe with your new sole options.