G.H. Bass Weejuns Penny Loafer

The Weejun is a slip-on built like a moccasin. A single piece of leather wraps up from beneath the foot to form the sides, and a separate apron is hand-sewn onto it across the top, the seam raised into a ridge that Bass calls the beefroll. Over the instep runs a leather strap with a slot cut into it. Below is a thin leather sole that can be replaced. The whole shoe is low, plain and quiet, and for most of the twentieth century it was simply what an American wore when he was not wearing lace-ups.

G.H. Bass made it in Wilton, Maine, a firm that had been building boots and moccasins for farmers, woodsmen and pilots since 1876. In the 1930s slip-on moccasins from Norway were being seen in America, and Bass's version took its name from them: Weejuns, for Norwegians. The company gives 1936 as the year the first pair was made; one Wikipedia article puts it two years earlier.

The strap made the shoe famous. The story Wikipedia records is that in the 1950s students at American prep schools slipped a penny into the slot, and the shoe became known as the penny loafer, a name now used for anyone's version. Bass dates a Weejuns craze to the 1960s, when the loafer was part of the uniform of American campuses, and a second to 1982, when Michael Jackson wore a black pair in the opening of the Thriller video.

The company has changed hands several times and the shoe is no longer made in Maine. The classic men's model, renamed in 1993 and now called the Larson, is hand-stitched in El Salvador, and Bass says it is still made with the construction methods of 1936: a tubular moccasin cut in four parts, the beefroll sewn with two needles, a branded leather sole stitched on. It has some cushioning under the foot that the first pair lacked, and otherwise it is the same shoe.