I remember watching my father polish his work shoes when I was a girl. He had a cardboard box with all of the supplies kept inside. I would watch him rub the polish into the leather then buff the dried polish till the shoes shone. My mother took care of our shoes, removing scuffs from patent leather with rubbing alcohol, covering marks on other leather shoes with a liquid polish, or washing our sneakers in the washing machine periodically. There always seemed to be a pair of drying sneakers sitting in front of the refrigerator where warm air came out and dried the shoes. This was normal care-taking of shoes.
If a shoe developed a problem, there was a shoe repair shop nearby that could fix them. My dad would boast that he'd had the same pair of dress shoes for over a decade, taking care of them himself in the evenings and by getting them resoled at the repair place when needed. My dad wore an odd shoe size which was difficult to source, so making shoes last longer was imperative. But my parents were also just normal thrifty people, like most folks I knew as a girl.
I wore leather dress shoes to my job pre-kids, and I used the skills I learned to keep my shoes looking nice for as long as possible, too. But sometime in the last 35 years, the art of shoe care and repair just got lost in our society. Shoes got cheaper, were often not made from good materials like real leather, and replacing worn-looking shoes seemed more feasible than doing the work to make them look nice again. There's a big exception to this, though. Good quality sneakers/athletic shoes are expensive.
I can't wear cheap sneakers. I spend the extra money to get sneakers that work for my persnickety feet. For most of the last 10 years, I've bought black sneakers, because black doesn't show dirt as readily as lighter colors. I hose my black sneakers off from time to time when coming back in from the garden, then let them dry in the sun. This summer I decided that I wanted some light-colored sneakers. I chose this pale green pair. They go well with capri-length pants and my khaki skort -- my summer uniforms for casual days. I feel that now I don't look as dorky as I did with black sneakers and a skort. But I still wear my black sneakers for really dirty work.
One issue with the light-colored sneakers, they show dirt very quickly. I've been reminded that I need to clean these more frequently than I do my black shoes. One of the things that's changed over the years, though, modern sneakers and athletic shoes are often made of synthetic materials that seems to clean easily. With this pair, I hold a shoe over the kitchen sink and use a little dish soap on a rag to clean the dirt off the toes, where I seem to get my shoes the dirtiest. Then rinse under water and set in the sun to dry. I seem to need to do this a couple of times a month. This last time I was thinking to myself that you don't hear much about people polishing or cleaning shoes any more. A couple of years ago I went to buy actual shoe polish for my husband's dress shoes and had to go to a couple of stores to find what I needed.
So now I'm wondering, does anyone else regularly clean or polish their shoes? Is this a chore you routinely do? Have you found ways to make the job easier or gentler on your shoes?
