Fancy Mom Asks: What Do We Do About Socks?

This is niche - but it does make a big difference!

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Ok, so this isn’t actually something my Fancy Mom asked me about, but it’s something I notice a lot out in the wild, especially with “ladies of a certain age” (and I’m getting so sick of typing that out, so from now on I’m going to just say Ladies. Ladies = women who are not necessarily a certain age group, but who feel like most mainstream media is speaking to a younger mindset, or someone more interested in trends than they are. You know?

So my mom is one of these Ladies, and I know I have a lot of Ladies who read this newsletter, etc etc, ok ok, this is for all of us but also for you.

Back to it, I get a lot of questions about how to wear X pants or how to wear X shoes or what shoes go with X pants or skirt, and I wrote something about which shoes go with which pants already, and which shoes go with which skirts already, but I’ve seen all of this info and intel go completely to shit with the wrong socks. Socks!

When I asked my Fancy Mom how she feels about socks, this was her text back to me (remember, she’s still on her trip to Japan):

“Fancy Moms grew up wearing panty hose until we were in our 40s. Socks were for children or dorky characters on Saturday Night Live. They telegraphed fashion cluelessness. We inherently CRINGE at the very idea of showing socks. But in Japan elegant ladies wear thin short white socks with their pumps and a long skirt. So Fancy Moms are like: WHAT????? But the truth is socks are comfortable (a top consideration for Fancy Moms). Where do we get them? Do’s and don’ts? What shoes? Yikes. Unknown territory!!”

It doesn’t matter how perfect your pants or skirt or dress and shoe combination is - if the sock is wrong, it doesn’t work. And normally I’m flexible about “the rules” and pretty ~whatever you want~ generally about styling, but I’m kind of rigid about socks.

And the knowledge really isn’t intuitive! There have also been a lot of memes about how Millennial’s sock choices are “aging” them, which even though I feel kind of immune to those kinds of headlines, I myself did click! And it did hit home, and touch on something useful. So here’s what I think about the “right” socks.

Before we can talk about socks, we need to talk about hemlines. Both pants, and skirts - and then we need to talk about shoes.