Wirecutter on Bean Boots

And threading the preppy needle

Reading about clothes in newspapers and magazines transports me to another place. And by that I mean, what they say is often absolutely and inexplicably at odds with my own experience.

Me, in mine, almost a decade ago in Newport.

Here is just another example. Wirecutter on Bean Boots, with a review titled “I Still Wear the Bean Boots I Got Freshman Year. That Was 38 Years Ago.”

My own experience - yes, my parents wore them way back in the 1940s, going grouse shooting in the North Woods of Maine, but we called them pacs. Yes, we all wore them as soon as we could fit into them. (For me that was around the seventh grade at my little private day school.) Yes, they were all over my college campus and practically every other New England campus in the 1980s.