You can do so much better than brown dress shoes. Start here instead.
Wedding season is fast approaching, bringing with it a litany of style-related headaches. Invited to a ceremony with a ‘rustic formal’ dress code? Ignore it. In fact, consider this all the excuse you need to ignore any confounding, quirky-cute dress codes entirely—in the real world, there are only two pieces of fashion etiquette you need to adhere to. The first is obvious: don’t wear a white dress. The second flies a bit under the radar, but represents a faux pas no less devastating: don’t wear caramel-colored dress shoes.
You know the type of shoes I’m talking about, even if you’ve never given them much thought; there are hundreds of Pinterest boards rife with these exact atrocities. (If I could slap them through the screen, I would.) Don’t want to take my word for it? Take it from my eagle-eyed colleague Eileen Cartter, who threw down the gauntlet a whole year ago in GQ’s definitive guide to the nuptials circuit. “I believe,” she declared then, “that all the caramel-brown dress shoes that I’ve seen grooms and their groomsmen wear with their navy suits are going to age the way the poofy bridal gowns of the ’80s and ’90s did: like milk.” Truer words have never been spoken. And though there are few hard-and-fast rules in menswear these days, this one of them.
What should you wear instead? Easy—simple black dress shoes. Boring? Au contraire, brother. They’re classic, widely available, and work with every color of suit you care to name. Navy suit? Black shoes. Tan suit? Black shoes. Lime-green suit? Please, no—but also…black shoes.
On the contrary, the mocha-hued monstrosities I’m railing against here break up the visual continuity of your outfits, immediately dragging eyes down to your feet. No matter how much you want to divert attention away from your mug, they’re not the solution. They’re also less formal (even fundamentally unserious), and thus inappropriate for the occasion at hand: celebrating the everlasting union of your closest pals.
It’s not like you can never wear brown dress shoes again. The right pair will look incredible with a nubby lightweight blazer and billowy cuffed trousers. But that’s an expert-level move best left to the pros, and, frankly, you’re probably trying to cruise through the wedding gauntlet on beginner mode, anyway. That’s completely fine—as long as you recognize that your sister’s wedding isn’t the time to test out tricks you haven’t mastered.
I don’t mean to be heavy-handed, but I’m speaking from experience here. So learn from my mistakes, and those of countless guys before me: stick to black and you’ll be the sharpest guest at the party. If you can’t get the happy couple a decent gift, the least you can do is avoid ruining their photos.