Brogue

The word is Gaelic before it is English: bróg in Irish, bròg in Scots Gaelic, a shoe — and originally a rough one, a piece of untanned hide bound to the foot for crossing wet country. The perforations that now define the style were not ornament. They were drainage. A shoe punched through lets bog water out again, and the wearer arrives merely damp rather than wading.

A Grammar of Perforation

The vocabulary is precise and worth learning in order. A quarter brogue has a straight toe cap decorated only along its seam. A half or semi-brogue adds a punched medallion in the centre of the cap. A full brogue — the wingtip — replaces the straight cap with a W-shaped one whose points sweep back along the sides of the shoe, perforated throughout. The longwing extends those wings the whole way to the heel, an American elaboration rarely seen in Europe. The rule running through all of it is inverse: the more perforation, the less formal the shoe, because every hole is a reminder of the field it came from.

Out of the Country, Into Town

For most of the nineteenth century a brogue was strictly country footwear, and wearing one in the city announced that you had either just arrived or did not know better. The change is generally credited to the Prince of Wales who became Edward VIII — a man whose considerable influence on menswear ran almost entirely to importing the informal into the formal — and by the 1930s the semi-brogue had established itself as acceptable business dress. The full brogue never quite completed the journey, and still looks best with tweed.

The hierarchy still governs how the shoes are bought, merchandised and recommended. A client dressing for a wedding and a client dressing for a Friday need different amounts of the same idea.