Across medieval Europe, aristocrats repeatedly set off fashion fads and scandals by wearing poulaines, shoes whose flamboyantly elongated pointed toes could stretch far beyond the natural length of their feet.
In U.S. President Donald Trump’s Oval Office, a different stylistic choice caught the public’s eye this week: Photos of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Vice President JD Vance show them wearing black dress shoes with visible gaps between the shoe’s collar and the wearer’s foot, leaving the ankle to dangle loose in the opening like the clapper in a bell.
U.S. President Donald Trump has taken to giving the male officials around him new shoes, the Wall Street Journal reported this week — specifically, mid-priced Florsheim oxfords, ordered on the spur of the moment and then faithfully worn by the recipients.
But the presidentially approved footwear seen on Rubio and Vance, said the longtime menswear expert Josh Peskowitz, is “clearly too big.”
The Journal reported that, in Vance’s account, he, Rubio and an unnamed fellow politician specifically gave the president their shoe sizes: 13, 11.5 and 7, respectively. “You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,” Vance quoted Trump as saying.
Apparently Rubio is improving America's "international stature".