Trusted by sailors, busted by frat dudes, and singularly indicative of WASPs, the humble boat shoe fell out fashion’s favor a long time ago. But, finally, the time is right to redeem the loafer of the sea.
The charge began, as it often does, with the always-avant Miu Miu. Prada’s painfully potent sibling sent out flattened boat shoes as part of its Spring/Summer 2024 collection, granting its models the disinterested, lived-in loucheness of Saltburn‘s preppy failkids.
First fashion zuzhed up the Mary Jane; next it came for the loafer and ballet flat. Boat shoes were the next logical progression, in terms of reclaiming prep school footwear.
You could sniff out similar ivy-ish themes at other SS24 shows — Marni’s trippy plaids were a psychedelic evolution of the madras check; Bally’s sophisticated officewear was a private school uniform gone suave — but Miu Miu was first to give the boat shoe its best foot forward.
Miu Miu alone does not a trend make — well, sometimes it actually does — but it certainly is not alone.
Every season, designers as disparate as Off-White™, Dries Van Noten, Loro Piana, and Tod’s iterate on the boat shoe. It’s a consistent staple of Aimé Leon Dore and J.Crew lookbooks, where prep is always in style. They appeared in the excellent Fall/Winter 2025 Ralph Lauren lookbook. One of the last great shoes that Jonathan Anderson did for LOEWE was a club-footed boat shoe. Before decamping to Jil Sander, Simone Bellotti created the elegant “Plume” for Bally, a heeled boat shoe with a chiseled toe.
And earlier this year, Jacquemus put out his own spin on a shoe that he himself has been wearing for however many years, coated in the color of the moment no less.
Miu Miu was hardly the first to tackle the boat shoe though it may have been the first to make it transcendent, as is so often the case (see: Miu Miu’s effect on librarian glasses, biker boots, etc.).
Because to see the boat shoe get such a purposeful push from the foremost brand in fashion? That changes everything.
Growing up in Florida, I saw boat shoes on the daily, typically worn sockless and to shreds by pick-up truck-drivin’ dudes to whom fashion peaked with Vineyard Vines.
But the end result of seeing all these beat-up boat shoes was they gained an inextricable mental associated with a sense of unfashion. They are the shoe version of cargo shorts. You turn your nose up at ’em almost instinctively.
I think society at large has a similar standing when it comes to boat shoes. Across America, they’re widely regarded as a frattire staple.
That’s a shame because they’re one of the great quintessentially American shoes and many makers, including OG boat shoe brand Sperry, produce quality iterations domestically.
As such, there’s a perpetual place for boat shoes within the prep inclinations of the post-#menswear landscape, especially the chunky numbers made famous by Timberland and Mark McNairy’s G.H. Bass collabs.
But, perhaps because they come with more cultural baggage than school shoe peers like loafers and Mary Janes, boat shoes are only just barely escaping their comfortable but cramped menswear niche.
As such, it’s thanks to womenswear designers that the humble boat shoe has finally been redeemed.
This article was published in February 2024 and updated in April 2024.
