Keep White Sneakers White (Without Ruining Them)

A ten-minute weekly pass, sorted by what the shoe is made of — and the three habits that finish a pair for good.

How To: Fashion / Nelly / Keep White Sneakers White

Care Footwear

Three summers on the same pair. Creased, not grey. The Fashion Edition · Footwear

The dirt you can see is not the problem.

I have a pair of plain white leather sneakers I have worn for three summers and they still read as white. Not new — the leather has creased across the toe and there is nothing to be done about creases — but white.

That is not a product. It is that at some point I stopped washing them and started wiping them, on a schedule that has nothing to do with how dirty they look.

White footwear does not dull evenly. It goes at the rubber foxing strip, at the seam where the sole meets the upper, and at the laces. Three narrow places, greying several times faster than everything around them, which your eye then generously reads as the whole shoe being dingy.

Clean those three and the pair looks cleaned. Wash the whole shoe and you have soaked something that did not need soaking to fix a problem that was never spread across it.

First, know what you are cleaning

The foxing strip and the seam above it. Most of what you are seeing is in this half inch. Detail · Rubber and leather

The ten-minute pass, in order

1. 01 Laces out. They are almost always the greyest thing on the shoe and they are sitting in the middle of it. Wash them separately or replace them. New laces cost very little and do more visible work than anything else on this list.
2. 02 Dry brush the whole shoe before any water. Dry soil is dust and comes off. Wet soil is mud and gets pushed in. Thirty seconds with a soft brush, in one direction, before the cloth is even damp.
3. 03 Foxing strip first, with a damp cloth and a little soap. The white rubber band running around the base. It is non-porous, it takes real pressure, and it is where the majority of the grey you can see is actually living. Work along it, not in circles.
4. 04 Then the upper, by material. Barely damp cloth, small sections, no soaking. If the cloth is wet enough to drip, it is wet enough to leave a mark on canvas and to get into the glue line on anything.
5. 05 Air dry away from heat, stuffed with white paper. Paper holds the shape and pulls moisture out. White paper, because coloured newsprint transfers onto damp uppers. Not on a radiator and not in direct sun.

The kit — Nothing on that list needs a specialist product except the brush. A mild cleaner, one soft brush, one stiffer brush for soles, a microfibre cloth, and spare laces will cover every pair in the house. The all-in-one kits are convenient and they are also mostly soap — worth it for the brush, not for the miracle. — White sneaker cleaning kits — Some links here are affiliate links — if you buy through one, HowTo: Fashion Edition earns a commission at no extra cost to you.

The three things that actually finish a pair

The washing machine. It cleans them, briefly, and it also soaks the adhesive holding the upper to the midsole and beats a foam sole against a steel drum for forty minutes. Pairs that survive it once rarely survive it four times, and the failure shows up as a sole separating at the toe.

Bleach. On white synthetics and glue lines it can turn yellow rather than white, and once it yellows there is no route back. It is also indiscriminate about the stitching, which is often the first thing to go soft.

Heat. Radiators, hairdryers, a sunny windowsill. Heat shrinks and hardens leather, warps foam, and yellows adhesive. Every shoe I have ever ruined, I ruined while drying it in a hurry.

Every fast method is faster than the thing that works.

The creases are still there. I have made a kind of peace with creases.

What I have not made peace with is grey laces on an otherwise decent shoe, which is a thing you can fix for the price of a coffee and roughly none of your attention.

Drying is half of this, which is why the shoe rotation rule gives every pair a day off between wears. Suede uppers need a different routine again, brush and slow dry rather than cloth and soap, and JT covers it in suede shoes in actual rain.

Nelly — Style Director · The Fashion Edition