Three Popular Fall/Winter Footwear Styles…And How to Wear Them!

There are so many amazing footwear silhouettes and trends for fall/winter, but some of them may be tricky when it comes to figure out what to pair with them. Here’s my two cents on how to best style these particular footwear trends in order to make them, and you, look the very best! I’ve used some recent styles that I’ve been wearing (courtesy of Aerosoles) to explain the trends and how you can do it and make it easily work for your wardrobe.

[Pictured: the  Aerosoles Bella Vita Wedge]

Mixing Textures and Patterns

This can certainly be a tough one, but here’s a great rule of thumb: pick up on one of the colors in the pattern, and wear something of that exact hue for your pants, dress, or skirt. Another option: since these shoes are primarily brown, what other shades go with it? Navy would look great, as well as a vibrant, or even a deep burgundy red. Just be wary of working too many colors into the mix — for the rest of your wardrobe then, pick up on a similar color then in the show, or go with a neutral — for example wear a cream top.

[Pictured: the Betunia in Blue Suede]

The Slip-On Loafer (And a Navy Shoe)

With this example, I’m tackling two shoe trends and styling issues in one. Let’s start with the slip-on loafer: think about the genre of this shoe, and how you would see it — I would envision it as  something to relax or lounge in, a little luxe so that it’s not completely casual, as epitomized by the blue suede fabric. The perfect pairing for this is with pants, and for lack of a better word, tapered ankle slacks, OR woven, pajama-like in their width would look great! It’s much easier to style the skinny leg pants, and guess what color would be great? Black! I know that most people still feel at blue/navy and black is a faux pas, but guess what? You can do it! Just let the colors be far enough apart from each other — make sure you can tell that the blue is a blue, and not a black.

[Pictured: the Aerosoles Bec 2 Differ Tiger Printed Calf Hair Ballet Flat]

The Animal Print Shoe

I tend to shy away from animal print anything, as I tend to believe that most of the time it is done wrong. Not to sound harsh, but because the prints themselves are so loud, I find it necessary to ‘tame’ the rest of your look in order to capture the chic, sophisticated side of animal prints.  My recommendations would be to pull out of your closet all of your black stuff, and put aside anything that may look to shiny, dusty, or old. The rest of the stuff you have left that is black: there is a good chance that they will look best against the animal prints – as long as they are solid, aren’t over adorned, and fit you properly. And of course, you can always make an animal print accessory take a more casual approach with denim! My preference is to go dark, but you can go light — as long as again, you keep in clean — now super duper washed out or “whisker” effects, rips, or tears are found in the denim.

I hope the styling of these three trends for fall/winter were helpful; please leave in the comments how you would style these as well!

-Julia DiNardo