Example and relevance

You can see that the walking creases here are really deep. In addition, the leather is quite dry, which is indicated by the light color. By the way, not all walking creases are always as deep as in the images above. Walking creases can also be only moderately pronounced, as you can see here:

And often walking creases are a combination of rougher waves in the leather and many small, fine creases in the leather.

Walking creases in suede shoes

Walking creases mainly affect shoes made of smooth leather. With suede or nubuck leather, you do not have such problems and the leather simply always looks attractive.

Causes of walking creases and countermeasures

You can never completely avoid walking creases, but you can partly influence their severity (depth and number). Here you can learn which factors are unavoidable in shoes that have already been made and which factors you can counteract.

Fit of the shoe

This is a banal possible reason if you see strong walking creases in your shoes. Due to a poor fit, the shoe can crumple awkwardly while walking and thereby develop particularly many creases. I imagine this especially when there is too much space between your toes and the inner lining in the toe area. - Or when the toe box is too long.

Poor gait - too long strides

The optimal gait is to take rather short steps. This not only protects the sole and heel by reducing wear - it can also reduce walking creases. With shorter strides, your shoe does not have to be compressed as much as with longer strides. As a result, the walking creases are pressed less deeply into the leather.

This aspect will probably not cause strong walking creases on its own, but it can contribute to making potential walking creases more severe.

Poor upper leather

Walking creases can also be related to the quality of the leather. If, for example, the hide is taken from the neck area of the animal, then it will look accordingly wrinkled. However, I imagine something like this to be very rare, since good shoemakers will cut the right parts out of the hide on their own.

I think something like this happened to me only once - one of the two leather shoes developed enormous creases, and I suspect that in my case one upper leather came from a particularly wrinkled area. In my opinion, it will mainly depend on the tanning and the resulting quality of the leather whether a leather shoe develops strong creases. Overall, this is another factor that can contribute to the formation of walking creases, but does not have to.

Not using shoe trees

If you do not use shoe trees, you will eventually notice wave-like walking creases. They are created by the repeated process of being compressed during walking, which is a completely natural process in leather shoes. After wearing them, shoe trees ensure that the shoes remain in a stretched state, in which potential wave-like walking creases are smoothed out. That is why shoe trees are an important factor in so-called passive shoe care.

If you take the shoes with the deep walking creases from the very top and put shoe trees in them, you can already see a small improvement:

The overall condition of the shoes is still mediocre, but there are other means we can apply afterward.

Shoe care as a preventive measure against walking creases

In my opinion, this is a main reason for deep walking creases that are difficult to smooth out: dry leather. You prevent this by treating your shoes beforehand with a shoe cream or leather care product. This makes the leather more flexible and supple and less likely to retain the walking creases. I once had an experience with this where I wanted to try on some shoes that were old but still very well preserved. I then slipped into the shoes without any prior care and walked around a bit in them to test them, only to notice that ugly creases had formed. I couldn’t get rid of them quickly anymore, and certainly not completely. - The shoes had simply become very dry because of their age.

This story is meant to show how important proactive care is for your shoes. You can also treat creases afterwards with a shoe care product and soften them a bit. - But it won’t fully make up for the lack of preventive care.

That’s why I did it differently with the shoes from the pictures above. After inserting shoe trees, I immediately took care of the maintenance, and the result looks like this:

That is the overall condition at the end, and you can see how much better the shoes look when the creases are not so dominant:

Too much wax and blocked care

If a very thick layer of wax has been applied to the upper leather of your smooth leather shoes, this can block the absorption of shoe cream: the leather beneath the wax layer becomes dry and, over time, brittle if a lot of movement happens there. This is especially the case in the crease area, because the leather is compressed and stretched there while walking. Therefore, in such a situation, you should first avoid wearing your highly polished shoes. This is also sensible at first to prevent pronounced creases from forming.

As a measure, you should in this case remove the wax layer with a suitable leather cleaner - the milder, the better, but still strong enough. As soon as the wax layer is gone, you can care for the leather with a suitable care product so that the leather becomes

Incidentally, this situation can be relevant for mirror shine, because that mirror shine is achieved through several wax layers that are quite strong overall. I myself once bought some pairs of shoes in a very shiny condition, and then cracks formed in the crease area over time in one pair. After that, I was more cautious with the other pairs. A suitable leather cleaner for removing the wax layer is the solution here.

Poor shoe construction

A shoe can fit wonderfully: the foot sits comfortably in the shoe, and yet the shoe may not be ideally constructed. Professional shoemakers, especially in bespoke shoemaking, choose the height of the heel and also the curvature of the shoe in the toe area very deliberately to ultimately support the walking motion. Heel height and the curvature of the outsole are based on an imaginary circle that is created during the walking motion. And both aspects are designed so that the shoe creates as little resistance as possible during the rolling motion of walking.

But if the execution goes wrong and, for example, the heel height becomes too low, then you have to expect that the shoe must compress unnecessarily much during walking. And that in turn promotes the formation of creases.

Conclusion

We have seen that various factors influence the formation of creases. Therefore, it is very difficult to say what causes creases to form. Most likely, many different factors play a role - in varying degrees, but in a multifaceted way.

With some of these factors, there is not much you can do if you already own a pair of shoes. What you do have in your hands then is to make sure that your shoes are properly cared for and that the leather is not so dry. If that is not enough to soften the creases, then you need to do better on this aspect with your next shoe purchase, for example by buying shoes that truly fit you well.

Personally, I think that you can also wear shoes with medium creases. - Not for special occasions, but for leisure. I do not weigh the problem of creases very heavily. I suspect that I still haven’t seen everything in this area. Because I have either not had exceptionally strong creases yet, or I have managed to get them relatively smooth again with shoe trees and leather care.

Good example of limited creases

Finally, here is a pair of shoes where I have creases quite well under control:

This is not an exceptional pair of shoes, and I also have other shoes where creases are even less visible. But you can see here that creases are only minimally present:

  • very light ripples
  • small, fine traces in the leather These latter, fine traces can be intensified by excessive wax. Overall, walking creases to this extent are not at all bad, and you can wear such shoes quite well for their intended purpose.