Summer Shoes for Men Who’ve Moved Past the Tired White Sneaker

There’s a moment, usually mid-June, when a man looks down at his feet and finds the same shoe he found last summer, and the summer before that. White leather, low top, scuffed at the toe, bought in a hurry because it went with everything and offended no one. We all own a version of the white sneaker; that’s the small shame of it. It’s the sartorial equivalent of answering, “I’m easy, whatever you want” when someone asks where you’d like to eat—agreeable to a fault, and forgotten by the time the check lands. The white sneaker made sense in 2019. Now, it’s the khaki cargo short of footwear: technically functional, spiritually exhausted, worn by 30 million men who’ve all silently agreed not to bring it up. No sandals on this list, before anyone asks. Consider these the alternative for the man who finds the slide too easy and the white sneaker too tired.

The story across the spring collections and the collab drops is texture: suede gone soft as a worn baseball glove, raffia and jute braided by hand in La Rioja, calfskin pressed into the basketweave Bottega has spent 60 years perfecting, pony hair in colors that have no business on a shoe and look terrific anyway. The smooth white surface that flattened every summer into the same blank shrug has given way to shoes you can read with your fingers. The sneaker world has moved on, too—Grace Wales Bonner retired the Samba long enough to design something new, Jacquemus keeps mining Nike’s 1972 origin story, and the low-profile suede racer is what men now reach for instead of the court shoe. Here is a capsule of 18 shoes—loafers, woven mules, espadrilles, an elevated boat shoe and the sneakers worth caring about.