As TikTokers have recently been pointing out, there’s nothing less trustworthy than a man who slides his sweaty, bare feet into his loafers and thinks he’s fashionable
I don’t care how slutty you want to get this summer: If you’re a guy wearing any style of shoe besides sandals, you better wear some fucking socks. I understand that you want to show off a little ankle, that visible socks might ruin the look and that those little ankle socks are always sliding off your heel, but listen, neither of those consequences are worth the price of going sockless. It’s the equivalent of not wearing underwear, or sleeping on your mattress without a sheet. These barriers were erected for a reason!
The fashion politics of male socks are currently being discussed on TikTok, where creator @imstephen posited that if you can’t see a man’s socks, he’s a ho. Especially in dress shoes and loafers, he explains that exposed ankles usually means a guy is either going sockless, which is “disgusting,” or wearing super tiny no-show socks that he describes as “dainty little foot condoms.” Showing these socks, he gags and says he “can’t even look at it.”
Essentially, per TikTok’s hive mind, any situation that allows for your ankle to be fully exposed — whether because you’re wearing no-show socks or no socks at all — is ho behavior, and gross.
Elsewhere on the app as well as on Twitter, both men and women have discussed how there’s something fundamentally untrustworthy about a guy who doesn’t wear socks with his sneakers. It’s like, if you think you’re above the convention of wearing socks, what else do you think you’re above? Telling the truth and being an honest person, probably!
“Wearing sneakers without socks has got to be some psychotic behavior,” one woman tweeted this week. “Nobody cheats like a guy who doesn’t wear socks,” another guy wrote a year ago. Apparently there was a time back in 2014 where not wearing socks was “trendy,” according to the Brisbane Times, but I have to assume those crazy Australians were just out of their minds. Not wearing socks has never been the right move.
