Nautical shoes: why they are back in fashion and how they are worn in 2021

Spring / summer 2021 Trends the coolest men on the planet have traded slippers for the nautical ones, and has a simpler explanation than it seems.

By F. Javier Girela

If you have forgotten nautical shoes in the shoe maker, get them back. Don't be alarmed, the slippers will not disappear, they will continue to finish most of your looks, but for a few seasons they have been strongly rival with the shoes. Can some shoes be the new slippers? It seems so, judging by the trends of the last few seasons. Since 2020, the main luxury firms have been announcing the dusk of the sneakers-although the final decision is on the street-and gradually replacing them with shoes. Not of any kind: the shoelaces were intuited on some walkways, although they were beaten by a scoop and mileage by the loafers. However, the sailors compete strongly against them, and it is not by chance.

To find a consistent explanation, one has to go back to its origin: the beginning of the 20th century, with the development of the great ports of the Côte d'Azur and the popularization of water sports among the upper classes. However, at the time the sailing shoes slipped on the deck of the yachts.

Paul Sperry was one of those American navigational magnates who accused the problem. One winter afternoon, while walking with his cocker spaniel, Prince, Sperry realized the dog's ease to maintain balance on ice and snow. Moved by curiosity, he carefully examined the pads of his faithful friend's legs. What he discovered on them was a striped surface that allowed him to maintain stability on slippery floors.

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As an experiment, he took a piece of white rubber (so as not to stain the surface of the ship), with a knife he made clefts on it in the form of a pattern-later patented as Razor-Siping ™- and attached it to his shoe. And that's how Paul Sperry managed to boost shoe traction and create the first nautical shoes in history.

The footwear became popular and obtained a formal connotation, as it is a shoe, but at the same time sport, for being used in a sporting and relaxing context. You could say they're the perfect middle point between sneakers and dress shoes. From the races, they jumped to Ivy League universities in the middle of the 20th century. This National College Athletic Association was composed of the eight oldest private universities in North America: Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and Pennsylvania. These universities offered a pre-university course aimed at the children of the most influential and wealthy families in the country, to whom they began to be known as preparatory. Hence the preppy style. These father's children mixed sports and formal clothes without hesitation, as an aesthetic vindication that kept them away from their formal parents: sweatshirt with American, fireman with jeans, white socks with shoes …. And, of course, the sailors were one of his favorite shoes.

Now, let's get back to our time. American culture has been influencing our closet for almost the whole decade. From the preppy we started with (thanks to series like 'gossip Girl') to the streetwear that reigns right now. The sportswear fashion they created in the New World premium in our cabinets, so, now that we're looking for "new" things, we look around but Don't go to the other end. We take off the shoes and put on the loafers. We return to the classic (and relaxed) elegance we had forgotten and the preppy style we see reflected in the collections of Prada, Lacoste, Marni, Phipps or MSGM is the perfect transition point between sports and formal. Racing shoes are a perfect example.

How do you get along today? The most original thing is to go back to origin, as Gaudí proclaimed, and those who know most about fashion return that sports aesthetic by combining them with white socks. In the pants section, we have seen them from vermouth to long models, both jeans and Chinese pants, as well as Dickies, even with sweatpants in their most radical version. At the top of these looks prevail the sweatshirts, the bombers and the multicolour overcoats. In the pants section, we have seen them from vermudes to long models, both jeans and Chinese pants, as well as Dickies, even in their most radical version. At the top of these looks prevail the sweatshirts, the bombers and the multi-bag overcoats. In this way, they are updated and managed to get rid of that connotation as "father" and all the negative clichés they drag.

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