Details: Can you wear leather shoes every day?

If you want to wear out your leather shoes faster in the long run, you can wear them for eight or more hours every day. Foot sweat continuously damages them, and they have no opportunity to recover from it.

Dark spots will form much more easily on the insole inside the shoe — as traces of sweat. And this will increase the likelihood of cracks in the leather lining.

Leather should have a slightly acidic pH value. Better leather care creams are also formulated to bring the leather into this optimal pH range during care.

Foot sweat, however, is alkaline in terms of pH. When it comes into contact with leather, it will gradually pull the leather into an alkaline state as well. And that is not good for the condition of the leather.

Foot sweat inside the shoe is perfectly normal in itself, and you cannot avoid it in principle. However, through resting periods, you can influence how intensely the leather is stressed by sweat.

What is the right way to do it?

If you wear the shoes for only one to two hours every day, there is no problem. During the resting periods, however, you should always use shoe trees for your shoes.

If you are occasionally travelling for a relatively short time and only then wear the same shoes too often in a row, this will not harm your shoes that much — as long as it remains the exception.

As a rule of thumb, you should plan a resting period of at least two days for a pair of leather shoes after each longer wear. These are my recommendations, which I have also received from various other experts and which have worked well for me so far. I personally have more than enough shoes for a very generous rotation, but for a season I put together a narrower selection of shoes from which I pick my everyday shoes. So I also pay closer attention to not wearing the same pair of shoes too often in a row.

If you want to do things differently to gain experience or for other reasons, that is up to you. You can usually tell how much sweat a shoe absorbs by looking inside it, because absorbing sweat darkens the leather lining and the insole. This is intensified by frequently wearing your shoes for several days in a row — as is a lack of leather care for the inner lining and insole.