The Sock Conspiracy

There’s a quiet crisis afoot. Not war, nor famine, nor economic collapse – though, admittedly, we’re teetering on all three – but something closer to home, or at least closer to foot. I refer, of course, to socks. Or more precisely, the mysterious cultural phenomenon whereby men are expected to wear them and women aren’t – and when men don’t, the resulting stench is enough to drop a pigeon mid-flight.

How did we arrive at this strange fork in the sartorial road? Somewhere along the line, humanity decided that women’s feet were immune to sweat, bacteria and the laws of thermodynamics, while men’s needed to be trussed up like a Stilton in cotton tubes. A man in leather shoes without socks? Biological warfare. A woman in ballet flats with no barrier between foot and sole? Perfectly normal. If a man did that, he’d have to notify DEFRA.

Fashion, it seems, has conspired to liberate women from hosiery while condemning men to a lifetime of ankle strangulation – unless they’re the sort who think no-show socks are “for girls,” and opt instead for the full barefoot-in-brogues experience. You can always spot these chaps. They’re the ones trailing a faint but unmistakable aura of compost bin.

Of course, the irony is that women’s shoes – the dainty, flesh-revealing types – are designed to be worn without socks. Men’s shoes, on the other hand, are built like submarines. Leather-lined, poorly ventilated, with all the breathability of a council flat window in January. You’re essentially sealing your foot in a damp envelope and inviting nature to do its worst. It’s less footwear, more foot marinade.

And let’s not even start on trainers. The young, the bold, and the hygiene-indifferent now wear them sockless as a kind of statement. The statement being: “I enjoy fungal ecosystems and am happy to incubate one in public.”

You might think this is all a trivial gripe, the mad ramblings of a man with too much time and too many socks. But it speaks to a deeper truth: that fashion routinely ignores function in favour of aesthetic torture. If you doubt me, spend an hour in a Clarks trying on summer shoes and tell me which options aren’t either nylon death traps or made entirely of rope.

So here’s a modest proposal. Let’s end the gendered sock apartheid. Give men the freedom to flash a bit of ankle without sparking an olfactory emergency – and give women the option of actual socks that don’t come in pastel shades with cats on them. We can live in a world where comfort meets dignity, and where nobody’s shoes smell like a badger’s armpit at the end of a hot commute.