The Best Black Ankle Boots For The Office

My brother Sam calls black ankle boots the athletic sock of footwear, meaning safe to the point of having no opinion at all. I think that’s exactly the point, but we’ve had this argument three separate times now, usually while I’m trying to get out the door and he’s standing in my kitchen judging my shoes like it’s his job.

Here’s what I actually know after wearing a rotation of these through two office jobs and one office that kept the thermostat at what I can only describe as meat locker. Black works because it doesn’t have to think about your outfit, which sounds boring until you’re the one who spent four minutes on a Tuesday morning deciding if oxblood goes with navy and the answer was no, it does not, I was late. The boot doesn’t ask anything of you. That’s not the same as boring, that’s just a tool doing its job.

The zip versus laces thing matters more than I expected it to. Laces look sharper standing still, I’ll give them that, there’s a crispness to a laced boot that a zip can’t fake. But I have exactly one system for a 7:40 meeting I’m already going to be four minutes late for, and that system involves a side zip I can yank up while holding coffee, a bag, and my dignity in the other hand. Laces are a Sunday boot. Zips are a Tuesday boot. Anyone telling you different has never had to run for a bus in a skirt.

Where I actually got proven wrong was on the walk to lunch, which in my old office was six blocks each way and included a curb that seemed engineered specifically to humiliate ankle boots.

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A stiff sole with zero flex at the ball of the foot turned that walk into a shuffle, and I looked less like a professional and more like someone recovering from a minor injury. The pair that survived that walk had actual give where the foot bends, which I only noticed because I stopped noticing my feet at all, which is the whole point.

Sam still thinks black is the choice you make when you’ve given up on having a personality in your footwear, and some days, standing in front of my own closet full of black boots, I sort of see it. I don’t fully disagree with him anymore, I just think he’s optimizing for a compliment and I’m optimizing for a ten hour day. We haven’t settled it. I don’t think we’re going to.

The gamble here is the pointed toe pair I bought anyway, because it looks incredible with trousers and slightly like a costume with a skirt, and I knew that buying it. Wear it deliberately, not by accident.