Here in the UK, we wear trousers, not pants. They’re cuffed to show off our trainers, not our sneakers. And when those shoes are no longer clean, we toss them in the bin, rather than the trash. But we’ll gladly welcome one US import, even though it refers to an item so British you could serve it with bacon and beans.

Across the Atlantic, our ‘full brogue’ becomes the ‘wingtip’. Both denote a shoe that, as our prosaic term doesn’t suggest, features a leather ‘W’ at the toe that echoes a bird seen mid-beat. A pair of wings, at the tips of your shoes. Wingtips. Thank you, land of Hemingway.

We prefer ‘wingtip’ not just for its poetry. The term also offers some much-needed specificity. Men’s footwear styles are awash in interlocking and often contradictory definitions. Broguing, for example, properly refers only to the holes punched in the toes, though it is often used to mean any shoe with detailing. Equally, it’s possible to find wingtips without broguing – a smooth toe cap, but still with that swoop of leather toward the heel. They are known, confusingly, as austerity brogues.

Actually wearing them is, thankfully, rather simpler. “Although they are a traditional style, wingtips must be the most versatile shoe ever,” says Andrew Loake, head of the eponymous Northampton shoemaker.

The devil is in the detailing. Their extra texture makes wingtips a mite more casual than plain lace-ups, so they’re happy sat beneath your dark denim as well as your suit. “We don’t find there’s a specific man that wears wingtips,” adds Loake. “In decades gone by they looked good with Oxford bags and now they’re equally good with skinny jeans.”

The History Of Wingtip Shoes

The wingtip was born from the brogue, which wasn’t always a shoe that one could wear to nice restaurants. “They were originally made from plaited hair and perforated, to allow water to pass in and out,” says Neil Kirkby, from Joseph Cheaney. That feature made life more pleasant for Irish farmers, who spent much of their day tramping through bogs and didn’t fancy taking the water with them. The name comes from the Gaelic word bróg, which means ‘shoe’, although ‘brogue’ didn’t enter the lexicon until the 1900s, to denote footwear you’d wear for a muddy ramble.