Hiked up boots

You know what's a silly idea? Taking a traditional utilitarian shoe and sticking a high heel on it.

You know something I love? Wearing a traditional utilitarian shoe with a high heel on it! Over the years, I've found plenty of stylish ways to wear sneakers with heels (Peep my "Sporty Stripes" post for a recap!), and now it's time (finally!) to expand my reach to hiking boots.

Heeled hiking boots (or should I say, "hiked up" hiking boots?) are no new thing under the sun—as long as I've been a shoe collector, there's almost always been at least one pair for sale at my favorite shoe-shopping outlets. However, when faced with the option to buy a pair, I've always declined, my reasoning being that the excessively rugged look would clash with my excessively feminine tastes—at least for the significant proportion of outfits which I'd normally pair with heels.

That finally changed when I found this green pair at the thrift store for a little under 4 dollars. At that price point, I was a lot more comfortable taking a chance on them than I would have been with a higher-priced pair of new ones. Plus, the green color – muted though it may be – was a major selling point in a field saturated with browns and blacks. I'd been wanting a pair of green ankle boots; why not these?

For the boots' first wear, I paired them with some dark skinny jeans in the same colorway, a beige layered tunic, and my eminently useful green heart jewelry set.

Taken as a whole, the outfit is not particularly memorable, but in addition to being my first foray into heeled hiking boots, it also demonstrates a new styling technique I've been enjoying of late: letting your pants bunch up at the bottom.

Ever since ankle boots surpassed knee-highs as the shoe of choice to wear with skinny jeans, I've been having a problem: my jeans are never quite skinny enough to fit neatly into the boot! More often than not, they ride up slightly and then pooch out just a tad, right above the top of the boot shaft (Here's a good example). It's not a dramatic effect; it's not enough to make me swear off tucking my jeans into my low boots; just enough to really, really grate on me once I started noticing it.

One solution is to roll up the hem of your pants so that they completely clear the top of the boots. This is a popular technique, but it only works on certain styles of pants. They have to have the right height, width, and amount of taper, or else the cuff will look stupid. Many times, I've attempted a cuffed hem and given up in utter despair.

But then, I learned from trusted fashion publications that it has become stylish to wear your pants long and let them bunch up at the bottom—without even attempting to stuff them into your boots. What a game-changer this has turned out to be!

For today's outfit, I tried both the rolled cuff and the bottom-bunch and decided the latter was infinitely preferable. While the rolled cuff competed too much with the sweater cuff already on the boot, the bunched pants fit right in...and they completely covered my leg (no chilly ankles!) Generally, I think this styling is more effective with straight-leg jeans (another up-and-comer, they say!), but it worked just well enough with my slightly loose skinny jeans to meet my approval.

Just for reference, below the picture below shows what these pants would have looked like if I tucked them into my boots, vs. how I wore them today. For me, even though the scrunching looks sloppy, it looks artfully sloppy, which I prefer to the unintentional "wasp-waist" effect I tend to get when tucking the pants in.