voxsartoria

The formal pump is the oldest item of Western male tailored dress intact in its original form yet still worn in modern times. Its origins date back to the 16th century when men of means wore boots during the day and either formal boots or dancing pumps in the evenings.

By the Regency period, the shoe had simplified into versions incorporating a silver or steel buckle. The buckle was a Puritan innovation to tame the more unrestrained flourishes of the powder and wig period.

The buckle lost favor as Beau Brummel helped to bring the silk bow into ascendancy as the buckle’s more austere replacement. The formal pump has since remained about the same for the past two hundred years.

Much of the contemporary chatter expressing gender anxiety about the formal pump is caught up on the shoes alone rather than how bowed pumps contribute to the overall harmony of dinner or formal wear…almost as if empty shoes were going to an occasion, and not the whole man.

If formal pumps fill you with doubt, do not wear them.

When one is dressed severely in black and white, in surroundings that are typically (although not always) special, and often surrounded by women in festive mood, some of whom will be beautiful (one hopes), some vivacious (one prays), some dressed well (one wishes), and sometimes all three (!), and yet the man comes off as a nervous wreck because of shoe-worry and a shirking nature, he is sunk for the evening anyway no matter what shoes shods his feet.

But: pumps take something mundane and make them special and connected to history. For me, that is one of several potential basic elements to having a classic personal style in an age of aesthetic mediocrity.

Is there anything wrong about a patent oxford with flat, silk laces?  Not at all, and yet…

It is almost guaranteed that at a black tie event, the least stylish men will be wearing lace-ups (or, say, bicycle toe loafers.) I do not mean that there will not also be guys who look good in their oxfords or patent derbies (there will be, I hope), but all of the dudes who wear their dinner clothes uncomfortably and self-consciously will be in lace-ups as well.

Why join them?