The Best Dress Shoes for Men Are Hard-Working Hard-Bottoms

Best Plain-Toe Dress Shoes: Alden Plain Toe Blucher Shoes

Alden

Cordovan Plain Toe Blucher

AccordionItemContainerButton

Pros

• High-quality materials and craftsmanship
• Natural sheen and water-resistance
• Versatility

Cons

• Mortgage-style price tag
• Break-in period

Plain toe dress shoes can be tricky. Too bulbous and they look like an everyday pair of Doc Martens. To sleek and you’ll have to find your way out of 2008, somehow. And if you want a pair that’ll go toe-to-toe with the most formal situations as well as a beat-up pair of blue jeans as certified casual shoes, there aren’t many pairs that can do both well. But time and again, I find myself recommending Alden’s plain toe blucher in black shell cordovan. It’s a legendary shoe that menswear snobs and fashion fiends alike often have on their list of grails. The shell cordovan leather is among the best in the world, with a super-tight smooth grain that’s water-resistant and creases much more elegantly than cow leather. Plus, it’s got a natural sheen that really catches the eye but doesn’t blind you like patent leather (which either comes off as corny or way too formal).

Alden’s been around since the late 1800s, and making shoes like these—supremely durable, surprisingly versatile—ever since. The blucher is the brand’s signature style, and it’ll look just as good with a tweedy sport coat and faded jeans as it will a hefty cable-knit and slouchy dress pants. But be prepared for the two main sticking points. As any shell cordovan shoe owner like me will tell you, the first few weeks of wear will test you, but it’s absolutely worth it. The other sticking point? It’ll also test your wallet.

More Dress Shoes We Love

How We Test and Review Products

Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.

Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.

How We Make These Picks

We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.

To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.

We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.

Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.