HELD MOTORCYCLE SOCKS

Author: Boris Mihailovic Date Posted:16 June 2020

THE GERMANS EVEN ENGINEER THESE...

I have two pairs of these. One pair I got five years ago when I went traipsing all over Europe on a motorcycle. And one pair I got just a few months ago.

And here’s the thing. I can’t tell them apart in terms of wear. Both pairs, the new and the old, feel and look just the same, which is a testament to how well-made they are, I guess.

Now I don’t know how many of you give much thought to your socks. They have been an after-thought for me ever since boot technology improved to the point where socks play almost no part in terms of warmth of comfort.

Once, socks were very important. Motorcycle boots were shit, and bikes were unreliable, and socks were important because you needed them to keep your feet warm, and you needed to be able to walk a long way in them, sometimes pushing your dead bike. The suffering was real.

But that was then and this is now, and our suffering has much diminished. Bike gear has got much better, and when a company like Held decides it needs to address socks, it’s a fair bet it’s going to engineer some serious German genius into them.

These days, if you haven’t got a decent pair of socks on your hideous feet, then you’re just cheapening your life, and making the world an unpleasant place for your feet. And you don’t know good socks are until you wear good socks.

I did not know good socks. And now I do. And when I take my boots off, and people see my Held-socked feet, they instantly understand I am a person of quality and, dare I say it, style and substance.

What do people see when they see you in your socks? Are they looking at some stink-hooved mendicant, with his thick, yellow toe-nails poking through the ragged holes of his foot-rags? I should hope not.

After all, it’s an issue so easily resolved.

Quite frankly, when Held provided me with socks to review, I shrugged and thought: Meh…socks. What’s to review? Well, like any thing that has been improved from the expected paradigm, quite a bit.

Firstly, these Held socks obviously last. The soft stuff they’re made of (a combo of cotton, nylon, and what I think might be some kind of space-age stretchy material) is very comfortable.

The comfort-level is increased with the addition of padded bits on the stress-points of the foot. Those are the bony bits that stick out. The material used in the toes and the soles is thicker and re-enforced, and I have yet to see a stray bit of stitching on any Held product.

The socks really are lovely bits of gear. And yes, I know they’re just socks. But they are excellent socks, and thus transcend the ordinary. They even label them Left and Right. Not because they imagine you’re missing chromosomes, but because the socks are Left and Right biased.

The summer ones are $30, and the winter ones are $50.