The beauty of urban legends is that they are like Homer's epic, they are passed down by word of mouth and, passing from one mouth to another, they take on the flavor and breath; the outline changes, the heart remains intact. Putting them on paper means returning only one of the possible versions. It was like this for the heroes of the Iliad, it is still like this today for the mythical pieces that are worn and that are part of a choral design. Penny Loafers deserve a place of honor among the protagonists of the twentieth century, or rather, the penny that made them famous.
It is impossible to trace the author of the gesture. Who was the first to put a coin in the tiny pocket that opens on the upper of the Weejuns made in Maine by the shoemaker George Henry Bass? Among the accredited hypotheses is one that leads to the golden age of the Ivy League. The Thirties and Harvard College in the very nearby state of Massachusetts is at the top of the list of those attended by the offspring of the American aristocracy; not even they, however, escape the rules of an iron discipline that, among other things, touches on telephone calls, which could be made only at certain times and were subject to the duration of the single "token". The minimum amount for a greeting to the family or girlfriend is precisely that.
It’s easy to think that this custom was started by some eccentric student. The very tidy look, made of ironed shirts, ties, knitted vests, jackets and bomber jackets that today are the boyfriend model, trousers with pleats, for girls skirts strictly below the knee, and the moccasins just introduced in the must-haves of the casual classic, leaves no room for customization. There, in that opening studied, also, for practical purposes by its manufacturers who had traced a typical shoe of Norwegian fishermen, Weejuns is the nickname by which the Americans called them , there is a glimmer of hope. It is a way of combining business with pleasure, of transgressing without attracting attention, a detail of personality so right that it spreads by imitation with a pervasiveness never seen before. Here the first disappears in the multitude and the company itself uses that communication as a marketing lever for its product. The Penny Loafer is no longer the prerogative of a certain upper-middle-class affluence: it's pop.
It moves on to music, cinema and television, not even the War slows down its spread and at the end of the conflict it is seen on the rising star of Elvis, his way of further personalising it by adding the white sock returns from the Eighties with Michael Jackson, almost to consolidate a trend already started by James Dean and Paul Newman. It goes well with the impeccably bon-ton look of his girlfriend Priscilla. Katherine Hepburn is the symbol of a determined, independent femininity, she is perhaps the most beloved actress in Hollywood, she embodies the garçonne from overseas, she almost never separates from them; to her and to Audrey Hepburn, who instead chose the Penny Loafer as a declaration of casual elegance, goes the credit for having ferried them into the wardrobe of women. Seen through the lens of contemporaneity, both could be the face of at least one of the trends that are crossing the present: one realizes that from the first, Armani could have taken the silhouette of the Eighties, while the second has been referred to, exaggerating a bit, by the mods and punks of London.
It's incredible how a shoe can be worn by cultures that are sometimes at opposite ends of the spectrum. From early rock and roll to the conceptual music of the Nineties to that of Herry Styles in glam by Gucci; from the Gothic Lolita of Shibuya and manga to the very secular ladies of Prada and Northern European minimalism; it's the superstitious power of a talisman expressed in style.
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