I have always had an internal battle with winter and the attire. On one hand, I absolutely love the idea of getting bundled up and layering lovely coats upon lovely clothes underneath, adding a nice scarf and looking well presented. But the battle came down below with the footwear, a battle that I am sure that many people who wear nice shoes have. What do you do when it snows? Suffer, that’s for sure! But seriously, one can wear galoshes but the snow is sometimes higher than that and will still get into your shoes. So what do you do? You might wear a boot and switch to your dress shoes at work. Okay. But the problem is that most boots look tremendously terrible underneath dress trousers. That’s were this model comes in.
I am not sure if there is a style name for this boot (like Oxford, Darby etc), but all I do know is that I believe that the French shoe company, Paraboot (see below), was the first one to really make them popular and from there on, people followed suit. However, while I like the Paraboot version for what it is, I still find it quite heavy to wear underneath a nice pair of trousers and have long yearned for someone to make it more sleek. That is where this version by Ronnie Fieg steps in. It has the look and the feel of the Paraboot but with a few layers of heaviness stripped off. The only question now is if it would still be relatively weatherproof as I am sure the Paraboots are? Either way, I love it and would happily put them underneath a pair of dress trousers but only for my commute through adverse weather…..and quite possibly with other laces!
Nice boots but if your looking for something lite-ish why not wear a service boot with a lugged sole? Or better yet for the city side zip commuter boots.
Brian
Have you seen Redwing’s heritage collection? They have some pretty sturdy models that don’t look at all bad with a suit. Not winter boots in the sense you might need them in the midwest, but more than a match for your average English winter.
i have not,,will have to check it out, although I have never been a fan of their heaviness….
I’d call them hiker boots to be honest. The last ones look amazing, I’d defintely wear them, even though snow hardly appears here
yea you are right, they are hiker boots…
My solution for more than a decade has been Crockett and Jones Coniston.
a great boot too….
Justin that boot isn’t Ronnie Fieg, it is just a Merrell Wilderness Original: http://www.merrell.com/US/en-US/Product.mvc.aspx/7178M/5843/
These are the Merrell x Rennie Fieg boots: http://www.ronniefieg.com/blog/merrell-x-ronnie-fieg-the-merrell-wilderness-collection/
Great blog by the way.
Diego
thanks for the clarification Diego, I just assumed that they were a RF collabo as I got the pic of his Instragram….thanks for the kind words!