Male shoe anxiety hits the Oval Office [View all]

(CNN) -snip- President Donald Trump has taken to giving the male officials around him new shoes, the Wall Street Journal reported this week — specifically, mid-priced Florsheim oxfords, ordered on the spur of the moment and then faithfully worn by the recipients.

But the presidentially approved footwear seen on Rubio and Vance, said the longtime menswear expert Josh Peskowitz, is “clearly too big.”

The Journal reported that, in Vance’s account, he, Rubio and an unnamed fellow politician specifically gave the president their shoe sizes: 13, 11.5 and 7, respectively. “You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,” Vance quoted Trump as saying.

What you can’t tell from a man’s shoe size — especially from his declared shoe size — is whether his shoes will fit. Despite the neatly marked mechanical precision of the Brannock device, male shoe sizes have a phantasmic quality, as inconsistent product sizing and varied expectations about comfort collide with men’s vanity and anatomical folklore.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/style/rubio-vance-big-shoes-florsheim-cec