As AIP’s history team closes out the year, we’d like to offer a small gift of gratitude to our readers this holiday season: an article about socks. While many holiday traditions celebrate socks as vessels of gifts and symbols of cozy warmth, children’s dread of receiving socks might have resonated with none other than Albert Einstein, who spent much of his life trying to avoid them. An article that Peter Pesic published this year in Physics in Perspective shows how this seemingly trivial personal preference offers a surprisingly rich window into mid-20th-century culture, the evolution of American fashion, and the interplay between rebellion and conformity.

Access the article via a gift link on Pesic’s website.

The medical origins of a fashion statement

Titled “Einstein’s Socks and American Style,” Pesic’s article traces Einstein’s sockless habit back to a distinctly unglamorous source: sweaty feet. In 1901, at age 21, the Swiss army rejected Einstein from military service due to hyperhidrosis pedis (excessive foot perspiration), along with flat feet and varicose veins. His feet, it turned out, saved him from unwanted military service, a fortunate medical condition that aligned perfectly with his pacifist inclinations.

In a letter to Max Born from a Baltic fishing village in 1918, Einstein expressed his love of spending whole days barefoot on the beach, wishing he could “introduce this lovely custom (voluntarily) in Berlin!” However, Pesic suggests it was only later that the tide of Einstein’s own behavior turned firmly toward socklessness. In 1928, Einstein traveled to Davos, Switzerland, to help young tuberculosis patients at a sanitarium by offering lectures as part of a larger effort to provide them with stimulation. Arriving as a presumably healthy helper, Einstein soon suffered a medical crisis. During his recovery, spending months confined to bed and unable to walk even short distances, he began more deliberately abandoning socks.

Ultimately diagnosed with a severe aortic aneurysm that could rupture at any time, he chose to live his remaining years according to his own terms, including by insisting on his physical comfort over social convention.

The barefoot sage and rebel

Yet Einstein’s medical history provides only part of the story. As Pesic points out, his decision about footwear had an ancient philosophical precedent in Socrates, who famously went barefoot in all weathers. Even during the bitter winter Battle of Potidaea, his companion Alcibiades marveled at how Socrates walked barefoot on ice better than other soldiers did in boots. For Socrates, going barefoot wasn’t merely comfortable; it was a practice of physical courage and endurance that reflected his philosophical commitment to truth. Einstein, who in 1927 admiringly compared his friend Michele Besso to Socrates as a “midwife” of thought, very likely would have known about Socrates’s status as a pioneer of the barefoot philosophical lifestyle.

The connection between Einstein and Socrates would have been reinforced by popular culture. Maxwell Anderson’s 1951 play Barefoot in Athens explicitly linked Socrates’s bare feet to his trial and martyrdom, with the character Xantippe lamenting that “Athens still wants beauty and glamor and success—not an old man in bare feet pointing out that the human race doesn’t know its ass from its elbow.” Performed in Princeton, New Haven, and on Broadway during the McCarthy era, audiences might well have connected this portrayal with Einstein’s own well-known socklessness, casting him as a latter-day Socratic questioner.

Einstein himself offered various explanations for his sockless state, often using humor. To photographer Alan Richards, he quipped that “it would be an awful situation if the containers were of better quality than the meat.” To his friend Peter Bucky, he claimed “simplicity” as a guiding principle—going without socks eliminated the need for anyone to darn them. To a neighbor, he emphasized mild rebellion: “I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to.”

Pesic also uncovers potentially more personal roots to this rebellion. Einstein once revealed that as a child he had been “spanked for not having on my Sunday clothes at the proper time” and disliked being told what to do. His socklessness also led to “embarrassing scenes” and quarrels in front of company when his second wife (and first cousin) Elsa would insist on sartorial propriety when important visitors arrived.

Socks in American style

Pesic shows how Einstein’s personal choice intersected with broader American fashion trends in complex ways. During the 1930s, affluent men wore loafers without socks only on vacation—at Palm Beach or the Riviera, never “in town.” Fashion-conscious undergraduates at Ivy League schools wore socks with their loafers on campus, carefully observing class-based dress codes. At Princeton, sophomores even “forced freshmen to roll up their pants to check that they were not wearing colored garters or patterned hosiery.”

Einstein, after settling in at Princeton, began wearing the khaki pants and baggy sweatshirts increasingly adopted by young American students, particularly the returning World War II veterans who flooded campuses with their comfortable, durable, military-inspired clothing. A 1951 article in The Daily Princetonian noted that Einstein’s “habitual sweat shirt, khaki pants and sneakers have become legendary,” along with his “going without socks.” Einstein bought Bass Weejun moccasins from a local shoe store, wearing them year-round without socks, becoming an unknowing pioneer of a style that would eventually sweep the world.

By the 1950s and 1960s, going sockless became part of “preppy style,” a more relaxed, somewhat rebellious campus fashion that Tom Wolfe described as having “a go-to-hell air.” A 1966 Time magazine article called bare feet the new “erogenous zone,” with students claiming bare ankles were “sexy” and showed “bone structure, like finely chiseled stone.” One Penn State freshman, writing during a controversy about T-shirts in dining halls, invoked Einstein explicitly: “Albert Einstein spent much time walking around in dirty clothes and sneakers; however, he was respected worldwide.”

Pesic is careful to avoid implying that Einstein adopted his personal style in imitation of campus fashions, or indeed that Einstein was himself a fashion trendsetter. Rather, his image resonated with his times. His bare feet linked him to the archetype of the eccentric genius, and in cultivating this image, he created a public persona that reinforced his scientific iconoclasm. His choice converged with young Americans’ search for new personal freedom in the postwar era, though his motivations differed from the fashionable hedonism or rebellious posturing of others who followed suit.

So, spare a thought for the humble sock during a quiet holiday moment. Even something that simple can have remarkable personal and cultural significance. Einstein’s small choice illuminates larger struggles to balance individual authenticity with social expectations, to find freedom within convention, and to walk one’s own path through the world, as he most certainly did. Happy holidays from all of us at AIP History!

Rebecca Charbonneau
American Institute of Physics
rcharbonneau@aip.org

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