Over the past couple of years you might have noticed the uprising of gray dress shoes being introduced by many of the well known Italian fashion labels such as Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Ferragamo etc as well as some of the other more 'racy' labels from other countries like Paul Smith from England and Magnanni from Spain. While many colors are introduced into a line to be a taste of something different, I feel like gray has become a reoccurring statement through each season as a color that could be in substitute for the commonly used black. And why would it not?
Top Shoes: Aldo Brue
Left Shoe: Magnanni
Right Shoe: Edward Green
Gray is a color that has been used throughout all of fashion's history as a staple color in the wardrobe but has just recently made it's way into the likes of the shoe world. I really can't understand why it took so long. It is not a bright nor racy color, on the contrary it is quite conservative and could easily be used to substitute brown and black shoes considering that there is not much that a gray shoe would not work with. It is such a neutral color that it's contrast against pretty much all other colors, that you find suits in, would provide a nice balance to the look of your outfit. To give examples of how to pair gray shoes with several outfits I have added some pictures below.
Although it is hard to see the contrast due to my lack of photography skills and not knowing how to properly use a sophisticated camera you can get the idea of how easily it is to substitute a black or brown shoe with that of a gray one. Hopefully you can see that on the left side I paired it with a black suit and on the right side with a navy suit. The only downside to getting gray shoes is finding a nice belt to match them. That, unfortunately, is something that has not caught on yet. You would think that makers would want to make belts to match their unique colored shoes or that department stores buyers would have better communication with each other to make sure that if the shoe department was buying a certain color shoe for the season than the furnishings department would follow suit and get a belt to compliment the shoes. But apparently this simple communication is too hard to ask for.
So above are the shoes that I was wearing, as you can see they are more of a dark gray which made it hard to see the contrast between them and my black and navy suits. For those wondering, they are a model by Ferragamo that is about 3 years old now. Whats also nice about this particular model is the fact that because it is a slip-on it's much easier to also pair with a simple, casual outfit which I also posted below for you to see just how easy it is.
This outfit is really as basic as it gets and they still go great together. Many people only think that dress style shoes can only be worn for dress type clothing but I think if paired right, a dress shoe can look very sharp with casual clothes. Like I always say, if you don't own a gray shoe than you should be thinking about getting one to compliment your wardrobe. You see here how simple it is to add to your existing wardrobe so you would not even need to get anything else to go with them!
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