Male shoe anxiety hits the Oval Office

Vice President JD Vance and Rubio are seen with their shoes on March 3. (Kay Nietfeld/picture-alliance/dpa/AP via CNN)

Across medieval Europe, aristocrats repeatedly set off fashion fads and scandals by wearing poulaines, shoes whose flamboyantly elongated pointed toes could stretch far beyond the natural length of their feet.

In U.S. President Donald Trump’s Oval Office, a different stylistic choice caught the public’s eye this week: Photos of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Vice President JD Vance show them wearing black dress shoes with visible gaps between the shoe’s collar and the wearer’s foot, leaving the ankle to dangle loose in the opening like the clapper in a bell.

U.S. President Donald Trump has taken to giving the male officials around him new shoes, the Wall Street Journal reported this week — specifically, mid-priced Florsheim oxfords, ordered on the spur of the moment and then faithfully worn by the recipients.

But the presidentially approved footwear seen on Rubio and Vance, said the longtime menswear expert Josh Peskowitz, is “clearly too big.”

The Journal reported that, in Vance’s account, he, Rubio and an unnamed fellow politician specifically gave the president their shoe sizes: 13, 11.5 and 7, respectively. “You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,” Vance quoted Trump as saying.

What you can’t tell from a man’s shoe size — especially from his declared shoe size — is whether his shoes will fit. Despite the neatly marked mechanical precision of the Brannock device, male shoe sizes have a phantasmic quality, as inconsistent product sizing and varied expectations about comfort collide with men’s vanity and anatomical folklore.

The bigger the shoe, belief has it, the bigger the man. Studies have shown that shoe sizes have no correlation to penile length. But as when Rubio and Trump taunted each other about the size of their hands on the 2016 primary campaign trail, one body part stands in for another, and for masculinity in general.

And men can be aspirational or loose with the facts about their shoe size, because shoes themselves are so variable. Shoe sizes have tended to creep up in the last few decades, and different makers have different standards, so one brand’s size 9 might be another’s 10, or even larger. The Converse Chuck Taylor All Star runs, by the company’s own account, a half-size looser than other Converse sneakers do. (Converse declined to comment on its separate sizing scales.)

Size discrepancies within a single brand are usually due to quality control issues, said Elizabeth Semmelhack, director and senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada.

“Within brands, the most common issue is individual shoe styles being manufactured in different places,” Semmelhack said.

Men are not always at fault for miscalculating their shoe size. There’s never been one standardized way to define shoe sizes, Semmelhack said. Before footwear was mass produced, shoemakers crafted their products for individual customers. Industrialization made it much more difficult to find a perfect fit.

It also behooves shoe brands to devise their own sizing systems, Semmelhack said.

“While it might be great for a customer to know that they fit into a pair of men’s 11 across brands, it is more advantageous for brands to offer more unique fits that might help them garner market advantage,” she said.

The style of shoe can also explain variations in shoe size. Formal leather shoes are known to stretch, whereas athletic sneakers may call for a slightly larger and cushier footbed.

Dress shoes are made to be broken in, said Justin FitzPatrick, who owns J.FitzPatrick Footwear and runs a blog about men’s shoes. They should feel snug in the beginning and will loosen with wear.

“An experienced dress shoe wearer knows they may feel a bit restrictive, might get some blisters, but they will eventually soften up, open up and feel like butter,” FitzPatrick said.

Florsheim does warn shoppers on its website: “If you’re between two sizes, choose the larger one. Keep in mind, athletic shoes usually run half a size larger than dress or casual shoes — so if you’re a size 10 in athletic shoes, you’ll likely be a 9.5 in dress or casual shoes.”

But Florsheims aren’t the shoes they used to be, FitzPatrick said. The brand is no longer made in the US and has outsourced its production to Cambodia, China, India, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Still, Florsheim shoes tend to fit true to size, Peskowitz said, and while the style Trump has been giving people is “typically more narrow,” that wouldn’t account for such a big gap in the shoes.

“There is a certain juvenile reasoning that might make men want to wear bigger shoes that I won’t repeat here,” he said. “But generally no. I don’t see people wearing the wrong shoe size as any kind of fashion statement.”

Where did Vance and Rubio go astray?

Did they misremember their sizes? Did they try to get them pre-loosened rather than letting them stretch? Do they prefer the ideal of the feet they wish they had to the reality rattling around inside their new shoes? Or have they simply fallen victim to the oscillation issues plaguing American footwear?

“I wouldn’t put this on Florsheim,” said Jake Woolf, a menswear content creator. “It seems just like a skill issue and/or user error.”

By Leah Asmelash, Scottie Andrew, CNN