In an interview back in 1996, veteran high heel designer Manolo Blahnik claimed that you will be judged by your footwear first when seeking to make a good first impression.
“Well after all the first thing you look (at) is always the shoes,” said Manolo, “so you better have a good pair of shoes to be OK presentable…“.
Since then, research has weighed in on the debate about whether shoes can create a favorable first impression. And it turns out that it isn’t just those in the footwear industry that might judge you by what you wear on your feet.
In Shoes as a source of first impressions, the authors took the first, er, steps towards correlating what people thought of their own shoes and what impressions others drew from them.
Their research was published in 2012 and it concluded that shoes “can indeed be used to evaluate others, at least in some domains”. However, while that claim made headlines at the time, there are some big question marks about it.
The research began by noting that although various people have suggested that shoes can reveal information about their owners, there is actually very little data to support these claims. That is undoubtedly correct.
More importantly though, the focus of the 2012 study was on whether the perceptions drawn from wearers’ shoes were accurate reflections of their true personality. While that might be an interesting question, it is different from asking whether shoes create a good first impression and what a “good” first impression actually is.
The 2012 study was also very narrow in its data source: the shoe providers were 208 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course at the University of Kansas. The sample consisted of 98 females and 110 males with a median age of 19. The shoe observers were also students, again with a median age of just 19.
More importantly, the shoe observers were given a key piece of information which surely must have influenced their responses. The observers were all informed that the shoe photos shown to them on computer screens represented the pair of shoes that the owner wore most often.
Only then were they asked to make judgments about the shoe owner’s personality, demographics, politics and so on. In other words, the researchers attempted to present the shoes without context but in fact added a make-believe context in which the shoes were judged.
For example, the judgements made about the personality of a wearer of high heels in a particular context might be very different from the judgments made if the observer is told that the person wears those heels as their shoes most often.
In the end, the researchers concluded by stating the obvious point that people use shoes to infer others’ characteristics. Of course this is correct, but it is correct for many other first impressions too. That’s why people wear neat dress and shoes to job interviews and turn up on time.
This obvious conclusion was backed up in a 2020 study called Psychological trait inferences from women’s clothing: human and machine prediction.
The authors of that study (which specifically excluded footwear) concluded that people use clothes to make inferences about happiness, sexual interest, intelligence, trustworthiness, and confidence.
In the end, there is a lot more work to be done to confirm the extent to which shoes create a good first impression, and how much of a disadvantage bad shoes might really be. After all, first impressions are only first impressions. But is it really worth the bother?
Instead perhaps we might be best to assume that people, like books, are judged by their covers. Meaning we should start on the right foot by putting our best foot forward. With an excellent shoe on it.