Orange Bottomed Shoes

Title: Orange Bottomed Shoes

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

Andrew Wolff is a junior at Dartmouth College and a Quantatative Social Science major from New Jersey. His mother is a college advisor and his father a sales representative for medical journals. He is a brother in the Alpha Chi fraternity, is involved in TAMID, a Dartmouth consulting group for Israeli start-ups, and organized the Dartmouth Model UN Conference. He is currently planning on joining a consulting firm after graduation, and became involved in corporate recruiting during his Sophmore Summer after hearing about it from his brothers at Alpha Chi.

Contextual Data:

Social/Cultural Context: Interviewees at corporate recruiting interviews wear business casual attire as an unspoken but widely understood rule, and there is a wide-spread belief that certain clothes help candidates’ chances to make a good impression.

Item:

Andrew has a pair of orange-bottomed Cole Hahn shoes that he wears to all important occasions, such as his corporate recruiting interview, because their bright colored soles draw attention to himself and makes a memorable impression to the interviewers. Against the generally limited array of men’s business wear, the orange coloring is enough to make him stand out without being inappropriate.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

“I wore a shirt and a tie that was the only ones that I brought with me for the summer for my first round interviews, and then for my final round ones I borrowed other ones because I didn’t want to look like I only owned that one shirt and tie. But, no, we don’t really have any clothes that we share as a house for interviewing and the CPD doesn’t have anything, but I’m a pretty big believer that, uh, that like male formal dress style, that you can distinguish yourself with really subtle things, so like wearing shoes that are a little-bit out of the norm, or like a belt that really pops, or cufflinks or something like that can really make a difference, if someone remembers something about how you were dressed, they’ll remember how you were standing, and also how you carried yourself. Um, so I have these sort of, these like, I don’t know quite how to describe them, but they’re Cole Hahn shoes that have this like really dark orange undersole that are fairly controversial with people, but that I really really like and I wear them to any kind of interview or event where I’m wearing a suit that I want people to remember something about me. So when I walked into my final rounds, for the most part they were like I really like you shoes, so I was like ‘yes.'”

Collector’s Comments:

This superstition falls into both material and customary folklore. As a superstition, it follows the magic superstition formula of if I do A, then B will result, in this case working as if I wear the orange shoes, then I will be more memorable as a candidate. Yet it also deals with the material folklore of clothing that surrounds corporate recruiting, since there is an unspoken understanding that candidates need to wear business-attire and that there is a “controversial” lines that the shoes push against.

Collector’s Name: Aime Joo

Tags/Keywords:

Dartmouth Folklore Archive