ANDRE BEGIN

Regular readers of my blog are probably familiar with my adventures in shopping that involve a lot of research, testing, comparison and sometimes disappointment.

One such situation these days is my hunt for white socks. All I am looking for is plain, white, mostly cotton, athletic-style socks for casual situations. Sounds simple, right?

For some reason, manufacturers and buyers for stores don’t seem to be on the same wave length. Plain white socks are hard to find.

For years I was able to find them here in Canada at a well-known store (that shall remain nameless). One day, I bought a pack of three pairs that left me with the impression that something was different. The answer came a few washings later when the elastics gave out and the socks were slipping down my shins repeatedly. This didn’t happen before. Someone must have changed the “recipe”.

I switched to another brand that was available at that time, which lasted a few years until they discontinued the men’s small size and carried only “one size fits all”. Whether you wear a large shoe size or a small shoe size (as I do), you know that one-size-fits-all is bull. When the heel part of the sock is half way up to your calf, or sticking out of your shoe, it’s not fitting “all”.

That is when the real hunt began. What sounded like a simple mission, was not so simple at all.

One would think that plain white socks should be simpler and cheaper to manufacture than fancier ones with logos, writing, horizontal stripes around the calf or geometrics through the foot of the sock.

When it comes to logos, who cares what brand I am wearing? It’s not like it’s a red carpet moment.

If it was a small, discrete logo at the top of the sock, it may pass in the absence of other available alternatives, but when logos are on the foot, on the toes or all over the sock, I’m not interested unless someone wants to pay me for being their walking billboard.

Horizontal stripes at the calf remind me of the tube socks I wore in the 1970s. While I don’t judge anyone who chooses to wear them, as a 50-plus-year-old man, I don’t feel comfortable wearing the same styles I wore when I was 10.

What’s with the fascination with colour blocking in recent years? I’ve always been a fan of geometric design, and I often think that geometrics look fresh and modern. But when the bottom half of white socks is grey, or the heel and toe parts are grey, they’re not plain white socks anymore. I admit to buying some, grudgingly, when I wasn’t able to find what I was looking for.

There was one time I found what I thought were the perfect pairs of plain white socks that met my criteria until I put them on. The elastic was so tight, it left marks on my calves and shins, leaving them looking like ripple-style potato chips. I tried washing them with different products hoping that the elastic would eventually loosen up but these pairs were relentless.

When I do succeed in finding some that are plain, sometimes they have massive seams in the toe area that will make wearing socks a painful ordeal.

Others might contain a high content of synthetic fibres. It’s a personal choice, but I prefer to avoid synthetics when I can, in the interest of keeping man-made fibres out of the eco-system.

Am I a tough customer? Perhaps. But when you can buy a pair of socks pretty much anywhere, isn’t the marketplace large enough to have room for all types of socks, including plain ones?

It’s sad that plain white socks in men’s size small are perpetually on my shopping list, simply because they are so hard to find.

Even though I have fully embraced the trend of colourful, patterned dress socks, I do like to balance it out with plain ones, for the times when I don’t need my socks to scream “look at me!”

I hope that designers, manufacturers and store buyers will come to realize that that there is a market for plain white cotton socks in a range of sizes, and I hope that stores will start carrying them again very soon.

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Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André