The Boot That Launched a Thousand Takes

There’s a thread doing the rounds that started as a shitpost about RM Williams boots and somehow became a genuinely interesting argument about class, value, and what men do to signal competence in an office. The original post was about feeling like a “weapon of an operator” after dropping close to a grand on boots. People were complimenting him at the urinal. Under the stall. That sort of thing.

The replies went exactly where you’d expect.

One person claimed they walked into work wearing RMs and the CEO immediately resigned and handed over his life. Someone else produced a LinkedIn post so perfectly constructed it physically hurt to read. Hashtags included #FootwearOptimization and #ExecutivePresence. I laughed, then felt slightly ill, then laughed again.

But buried in all of it was a real argument, and it’s one I’ve had with myself more than once.

The case for the boots is pretty simple: buy once, wear forever, resole when needed, done. Several people in the thread had pairs from 2011, 2014, 2017, still going. Terry Pratchett’s Vimes’ Boots Theory came up more than once, which is the idea that being poor costs more in the long run because you can’t afford the thing that lasts. Buy the cheap boots, replace them every year, spend more overall. It’s not wrong.

The case against is also real: plenty of other good leather boots exist, the quality has reputedly declined since Twiggy Forrest bought the brand, and there’s something a bit tiresome about a product becoming so ubiquitous in corporate environments that wearing it signals nothing except that you looked at what everyone else was wearing and did that. The counter-argument, which I find persuasive, is that versatility and durability matter more than originality in workwear. It’s not a gallery opening.

Personally, I don’t wear dress boots to work. I work from home most days, in my outer southeast suburb, on a laptop, in whatever I want. On office days I wear something decent, but nobody’s checking my feet. The urinal-compliment pipeline is not something I have experienced and I’m fine with that.

Still, I get the pull. There’s a version of buying something once, properly, that appeals to a particular sensibility, the satisfaction of not having to think about it again. I feel it with headphones, with a decent knife, with any tool that does its job and keeps doing it. The boots are that, for some people. For others they’re a costume. Probably both things are true at once depending on the person wearing them.

The Canberra observation made me smile. Someone noted you can track when a public servant hits EL level because the Kathmandu vest disappears and RMs appear. That’s not nothing. Workwear is a language and people read it whether they want to or not. I don’t think that makes it good or bad. It just makes it real.

The LinkedIn parody in the thread was the funniest thing I’ve read this week, which is both a compliment to whoever wrote it and a minor indictment of the platform it was mimicking. “Integrating RM Williams footwear into my daily operational cadence.” Honestly, you could post that verbatim and get three hundred likes from people who’d take it completely seriously, and that fact sits in my brain like a splinter I can’t get out.