Eastland Suede Bucks

Faithful readers of this blog (Luke), and I guess anyone who knows me, will know that I have a weakness for preppy clothes. Which is why I recently decided to buy a pair of suede bucks like the kind I used to wear in high school. It was a prep school, yes, and we had to wear uniforms: blazers and khaki or grey slacks, with a shirt and tie every day. 

As for footwear, what I wore most of the time were Bass Bucks, a suede "Oxford" type shoe -- it came in tan and green (I always went with tan) -- with an orange sole that had the consistency of a pencil eraser and wore down at about the same rate. They no longer make this shoe anymore in the same way. G.H Bass & Co. still in fact makes Bucks, but they are now called Pasadena Bucks and the soles are made of some kind of much more durable material; this was probably a smart decision, business-wise, but the fact is it's a different shoe now. Apparently you can only buy original style Bass Bucks used on Ebay. I will buy a lot of thing used, but frankly I'm not too into buying used shoes. So I have had to move on to a different brand in order to satisfy my nostalgia for the suede Bucks of my youth.

Now, before we get to the subject of this blog post -- the Eastland Men's Bucks -- it should be pointed out that a few different manufacturers make Bucks, including Brooks Brothers. However, what I was looking for was the closest approximation of the original Bass Bucks, which were cool but which were not a "high fashion" shoe. They were an everyday shoe meant to be mostly worn by school kids and to last through about one year of hard use. They costed, if I remember, about $40 back in the 1990s. Thus, I had no interested in dropping a couple C-notes on the Brooks Brothers model or anything similar. I wanted the run-of-the-mill, prep school Bucks I remembered.

Now we get to the Eastland Bucks. I am sure this brand of Bucks was around in the 1990s (and probably for a lot longer than that), but these were not on my radar screen back then. I never owned a pair of Eastland Bucks, the Bass Bucks being my gold standard. So, it is with all due respect to the Eastland Company that I refer to these shoes as a knock-off or imitation of Bass Bucks. It may well be the other way around.

On a side-by-side comparison, the Bass Bucks (the older version) still win in my mind. They had a sleeker silhouette, thinner soles, and a darker more chestnutty kind of color. If, like me, you are buying the Eastland shoe out of nostalgia for Bass Bucks, these will almost do the job, but they have a strange "toy shoe" kind of feeling about them, like they were made to look like shoes but are not actually shoes. I don't know if that makes sense. Specifically, my problem is that the soles are too thick and something about the profile is wrong. The toe area is too boxy and the shape of the shoe -- its footprint, if you will -- is too rounded. Furthermore, the color of the suede is too light. 

Now, look...competing with "memory" is never an easy thing. I mean, how many times in your life have you uttered the words "no, it used to be more/less [fill in the blank]" when talking about some product they don't make any more or something you are convinced isn't the same as it used to be. Maybe that's because it's not, and neither are you, and it's ridiculous to expect things to look or taste or sound  the same as they did to you 10, 20, 30 years ago. I will never again be a shaggy-haired 16 year old wearing Bass Bucks as I walk around campus on a blustery autumn day. Therefore, it's kind of ridiculous to expect to feel the same way about a pair of shoes, even if they did still "make 'em like they used to."

All that said, I am committed to at least persist and see if I can break-in these Eastland Bucks into something resembling my well-worn Bucks of old. One thing about even the classic Bass Bucks was they took a while to get worn in and lose that "straight from the box" look. Net net, they are a quality product and they seem like they will get the job done.