The Essential View: Shoe trees are actually useful, not just connoisseur theater. Leather shoes absorb moisture while we wear them, change shape as they flex, and then dry when we take them off. A properly fitted shoe tree holds the shoe closer to its original form as it dries and can reduce creases in the leather—though not forever. For expensive leather shoes, use shoe trees, but keep in mind that ordinary, good-quality shoe trees are probably enough.
Buy a high-quality pair of leather shoes and you can quickly find yourself sucked into an entire subculture of exotic creams and waxes, horsehair brushes, chamois cloths, shoehorns made of, well, horn—and of course wooden trees that you’re told to keep in the shoes whenever you’re not wearing them. Some of this can feel suspiciously like the price of admission to a secret society. It’s not dissimilar from owning expensive cars, clothing, or anything else costly and in need of regular care and maintenance.
Image: vcleat.com
Shoemakers themselves recommend shoe trees—although to be fair, many of those shoemakers also sell them. The question is, how much tree and at what cost?
Mama always said there’s an awful lot you could tell about a person by their shoes: where they’re going, where they’ve been.
A shoe tree does two useful things
Strip away everything else, and a shoe tree needs to do two things: support the shoe’s shape and help manage the moisture left after it has been worn. This is backed up from multiple sources. Loake says that shoe trees are “essential when the shoes are not in use… helping to absorb the moisture while maintaining the form of the shoe and imparting a pleasant woody aroma.” Crockett & Jones says that the benefits of shoe trees include “moisture absorbency, to gradually dry your shoes from the inside” and “[reducing] creasing by supporting the uppers whilst your shoes are not being worn”.
In other words, the shoe tree is a form around which the leather of a damp, recently flexed shoe can settle as it dries, and which assists in that drying. That’s really it.
Creases are inevitable
The vamp is the front portion of the upper covering the forefoot, and it’s where a shoe does much of its flexing as you walk. Walking flexes the vamp, and flexing the vamp leads to creasing. Creases show that a shoe has been worn, not that it has been neglected.
Image: Suits Expert
What a shoe tree does is provide gentle tension for the upper after the shoe has been worn, to reduce creasing and help maintain structure. It can’t prevent creasing, but it can help preserve the overall line of the shoe as it ages.
Wood is important, but which type?
If you start researching shoe trees, you’ll quickly run into claims that the best shoe trees are made of cedar. Is that true? Not that I can tell. As a general rule, wood is important—it’s durable but when unfinished, it’s absorbent, so helps remove moisture from the shoe. But as to the specific species, the claim for cedar seems to rest on a couple of assumptions, both of which are true but which may not matter:
Cedar smells nice. This is true for many people. You may be one of them.
Cedar repels some insects. This also can be true; however, the effect varies greatly based on the amount of cedar being used, how recently it was produced or re-sanded, how confined the space is in which the cedar is being used, which insects are the problem, and so on.
If I were storing a high-quality wool blanket in a tightly closed chest in a moth-prone area, I’d consider a cedar-lined chest. For a shoe tree, though, it’s personal preference—if you like how it smells, great.
Note that as you move up in cost, shoe trees tend to follow a progression that often goes something like this: plastic → cedar → various other woods (maple, beech, lime, et al). Plastic isn’t ideal because it’s non-absorbent, and besides, if you’re reading this newsletter, do you really want to put plastic shoe trees1 in your luxury shoes?
In short, wood matters, but I’m not aware of any evidence that cedar performs materially better as a shoe tree than other unfinished woods as commonly used to make shoe trees.
What does more money buy?
A good wooden shoe tree that costs $30 to $60 should provide a full heel, a contoured forefoot that supports the vamp, and plenty of tension to support the shoe. Above this range, there are a few things you might consider paying more for.
Above $60, you might find shoemaker-offered trees that match their particular lasts, as opposed to a generic approximation of all feet in a given range of sizes. A tree shaped for your shoe can more closely preserve its original form.
Above $120 or so, shoe trees become luxury objects themselves: better finished hardwoods, higher-quality hardware, hand-finishing, and so on. This may be important to you.
At roughly $250 and above, you begin to encounter genuinely bespoke trees made specifically to the finished shoe or to your individual last. If you’re buying shoe trees like this, you’re probably buying your shoes from made-to-measure or full bespoke shoemakers. Well done you.
The important point here is that there’s no linear relationship between price and function. In fact, if you have a choice between a $100 shoe tree made for your shoe’s last and a $200 shoe tree that’s luxuriously finished but generic in fit, the cheaper option is probably going to do more for your shoes over time.
The bottom line
Good leather shoes should have shoe trees. When we wear shoes, the upper changes shape and absorbs moisture. A well-designed shoe tree helps the shoe to dry while maintaining something close to its original shape. It won’t prevent creasing, but it will help the shoe maintain its overall line over time. However, there’s no good evidence—at least not that I’ve seen—that a $180 shoe tree does its job six times better than a $30 shoe tree. Buy a well-fitting pair, use it consistently, and you’ll do well. As a general rule:
The shoe tree is good practice. The luxury shoe tree is optional.
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1 That said, I myself have a couple of pairs of extremely lightweight plastic shoe trees that I use when I travel. They weigh barely anything and don’t take up any space, since when packed they’re serving their function as trees.
