My (very large) feet haven’t grown since I was a teenager, nor has my taste in footwear change much; so I would buy similar kinds of trainers/boots/formal shoes. When one would run out I’d buy another pair. If it was the exact some model I’d mix and match, if it wasn’t I’d store the still OK shoe away until I ended up buying that model again. This over a few decades left me with several odd shoes that were the same colour and type, but different in the detail. I’ve now just thought sod it, rather than buying new shoes I’ll just wear them odd. It’s black, it’s a lace-up trainer, if someone looks carefully it’s a different brand but who cares? Same with black boots.
That is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. No offense meant. How is it you wear one shoe out in a pair? Seems they’d get the same milage.
I have come across odd shoes in my kids closets when they were young. I never could figure that out. How do you lose one shoe? They both go in the same direction and should walk back in together. Somewhere in the black-hole that is my floor are several left shoes without their mate.
I can think of several reasons:
I’m right footed so probably average out more force on my right shoe
One shoe may end up taking a particuarly heavy gash frome a stone/uneven ground
The dog may chew one shoe
etc.
In any case I do often end up with 1 broken shoe and 1 perfectly wearable shoe.
Ah, that sounds reasonable.
Maybe they’re on the side of a road somewhere! I’ve always wondered - who are these people that are losing one shoe along the roadsides?
But isn’t the “old” shoe that you’re saving at least slightly worn? I would think that it wouldn’t really match the one new shoe you pair it with.
I’ve never heard of this either.
IKR? How does a shoe get off your foot and fly out of the car window? Shoes are weird and mysterious.
It’s better than throwing away a perfectly good shoe.
I ride a motorcycle; seems like I always have. The outside/bottom of my left foot wears out before the right because it gets more contact with the pavement and a slight drag starting and stopping. My right, because of the shape/specifics of my feet, tend to wear out first in the inside or lining. So I often have some really good lefts and some different but really nice rights.
I have mixed-and-matched but more for kicking-around-the-yard and more rough-use pairs-not-quite-pairs. I hate shopping for shoes so anything I can do to avoid same is within acceptable limits for me.
I don’t habitually wear odd shoes, but it’s so cold today I thought I should have worn my reproduction 1936-pattern RAF flying boots. These are black boots with shearling lining. Coincidentally, an old friend mentioned them this morning. She said not to get rid of them. People are paying up to $2,500 for them. :eek:
I have extremely malformed feet. My toes bend at a bad angle, particularly the little ones.
It takes me forever to break in a pair of shoes until they are comfortable, and I’ve thrown out many that never got to that point. When a pair of shoes does get comfortable, I wear them until they are falling off my malformed feet.
Ah. “Mis-matched” shoes. I thought you meant something like this:
You know right? People put their extra shoes for the gym or whatever on the top of their car, and forget about them when they are unlocking the vehicles. The other shoe would be somewhere near by.
I’ve had plenty of shoes chewed up by a new dog in the house. And they always just chew up one of a pair. “Hmmm… that was good, now for the main course I’ll take that boot over there.”
I’ve done it, but not routinely.
I also ride motorcycles 45 years & counting. I do not drag my feet either taking off or coming to a stop. This practice is dangerous & has lead to more than one broken ankle. Please stop doing this. Not only will this help your left shoe to last longer, but it may prevent broken bones.
If there is anything a novice rider does that bugs the crap out of me it is watching them drag their feet on the blacktop. With a little effort, one soon learns to pick up their foot as they release the clutch. They also learn to put their food down just after the bike comes to a stop. It will not immediately fall over if you have any sense of balance at all. Heck, I often leave my feet on the pegs while I wait out a light. Small shifts in my body weight can keep the bike upright for quite a while.
As far as mismatched shoes, unless I am needing to project a certain image, I would use a mismatched pair of shoes. My theory is that if someone is spending that much effort to check out my shoes, they must not have enough work to keep them busy.
I will admit that my shoes seem to wear out evenly for the most part. I once did slice open one of my work boots. A year later, I did it again with the new pair, but it was the other side. I had kept the old pair “just in case”. Since they were from the same manufacturer, & about the same color, I just polished the two good boots up & used them as a pair. No one mentioned to me that they had noticed the “mismatched” pair.
Once upon a time, I broke my ankle and had surgery and it took a loooong time to heal. I spent almost a year initially and then a couple of additional multi-month periods on crutches after subsequent surgeries. As you can imagine, I ended up with a few very unevenly worn pairs of shoes.
I tend to wear shoes until my gf says, “WTF is wrong with you?! Throw those shoes out!”. But they always wear evenly.
I was thinking, “Two feet, two shoes. Nope, not odd.” 
When I was in boot camp we were issued one pair of boots (duh!) and two pairs of dress shoes. The very next day for reasons unknown, we had to move to different barracks so it was throw everything into your brand-new duffel bag now, kid, and schlep it over to the new digs. As a consequence I no longer had two pairs of shoes, but four shoes, two lefts and two rights, with no idea which paired with which. I made a best guess but after a week it became obvious I had chosen poorly – the leather was crinkling in the creases totally differently, so I swapped them out and thought no more of it.
Now, my rate was such what I went through pairs of boots during my short naval career but never wore out the dress shoes. And, because a lot of work had gone into getting the shine right, I wore only the one pair, never putting on the the other pair again. Forwarding to when I got out, that pair was left with my father, who has my foot size, but he never wore them either, finally offering them up at a yard sale.
One old duffer was interested but curious why there was one virgin shoe and the other had obviously been worn a bit. My dad spun a story about how I’d been caught doing something in boot camp and as punishment been forced to hop in circles around the grinder on one foot for hours. The guy bought the story, and the shoes, but my dad told me later, “All the time I was spinning the story I was wondering why they were different.” I told him it how was all the fault of the DI rousting us from our first home.
I habitually wear mismatched socks, so when I once found a very comfortable shoe design available in two different colours, I bought one pair of each, and I considered wearing odd shoes in public, but never really got around to it.
Historian and broadcaster Adam Hart-Davis wears odd shoes on purpose (his rationale is that wearing two of the same thing is wasting an opportunity to enjoy variety).
I just remembered - I did wear odd shoes once - I bought an amazing pair of purple suede boots at an incredibly low price on sale. Only when I got them home did I notice that thee were slightly different styles - one had more lace holes than the other, and a squarer toe.