Find a piece · Almond-toe loafer
A loafer lives or dies at the toe.
There are three ways to end a loafer and two of them are a commitment. A sharp point drags a decade with it and reads as costume the moment the decade turns. A blunt square looks current for about two seasons and then dates faster than anything else in the shoe drawer. The almond sits between them, curved to roughly the shape a foot actually is, and it has never once been the wrong shoe to be photographed in.
The Loraine is Sam Edelman's take on that middle, and the house is unusually good at this particular problem — it has built a business on shapes that read expensive at a price that is not. What the almond buys you is length without spikiness: the toe elongates the foot the way a point does, then stops short of the part that makes people think of nightclubs in 2007.
It is the loafer to own if you only own one, precisely because it refuses to be interesting. That is the compliment.
The piece
Where it goes
If the sole matters more than the silhouette, there is a footbed hiding under one of these.
The house's embellished flat is the square-toe version with something on the vamp.
For the same shoe with hardware doing the announcing, see the office uniform's current default.
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