Why Is Everyone You Know Wearing White Socks and Loafers?
Spend enough time online—and baby, do I ever—and you’ll start to see certain tendencies emerge among the trendiest of serial posters. One day, seemingly out of nowhere, all of the hip content creators on your feed are suddenly wearing flip-flops, say, or crewneck cardigans. One of the most lasting recent trends of this ilk involves a triumvirate of pieces that, when worn in tandem, evokes the sock-hop uniform of a 1950s high schooler: shorts, white socks, and loafers.
Pleated in Osaka, jorted in Greece, or tatted ’n’ hatted in London, the shorts-socks-loafer combination is a global phenomenon that seems to appeal to style-minded guys across the space-time continuum. There is a smooth-brain simplicity to it—it’s just three classic menswear pieces worn together in a way that somehow feels both familiar, tapping into the most classic of Ivy iconography, and also new, remixing it for our post-streetwear, social-media-myopic era.
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick, who writes the popular newsletter “The Trend Report,” sees this as a stylistic callback to iconic images of, say, Harrison Ford at Cannes in the ’80s or Paul Newman at home in the ’60s, but reflected through the current lens of skate culture, hence the baggier short silhouettes. That also makes it a more approachable (read: traditionally masculine) version of the daring stylings of Harry Styles, Paul Mescal and Donald Glover. “It poses a tension between the formal and informal,” Fitzpatrick said. “That these two can exist in one space, suggesting that these skaters are donning camp collar shirts and loafers after hopping off their boards.”
I also spoke to Anu Lingala, a trend strategist who writes the newsletter “What’s Anu.” She, too, saw the white-socks-and-loafers trend as prime “reference culture”—a callback to the current cultural shift towards regressive conservatism, which romanticizes “conventional” American values.
“I think that’s rooted in a nostalgia for simpler times when things were less chaotic and just felt easier,” she said, noting that who it was easier for tends to be straight white men. She also sees this trend as a meta-reference, in the way that conservatism in the 1970s and ’80s was itself a reference to 1950s traditionalism. Examples include the 1978 film Grease and its rose-colored view of the 1950s, or the current “trad wife” movement. “You know,” Lingala said, “This country-club aesthetic.”
This look does, in a way, seem to be an extension of “old money style,” which younger generations deployed by latching onto with vague notions of prep and using them to their own devices. As Lingala notes, the internet—and even IRL, we’re all dressing for the internet—is devoid of context, so you can wear, say, a loafer, a sock, and some baggy shorts and not have to worry about what they may be conveying about class and status (even as the current government reverse-Robin Hoods money from the masses to the one percent).
