I Still Wear the L.L.Bean Boots I Got 38 Years Ago

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Duck boots lace tighter to your foot than rubber boots, so they’re not as easy to slip on and off. However, they perform in both wet and muddy conditions. Also, they’re cute.

My Rollneck Sweater is long since donated, but 38 years later, my L.L.Bean Bean Boots are still a closet mainstay. Their endurance owes as much to Yankee craftsmanship as it does to the company’s generous sizing: When my boots finally showed up in my dorm’s mailroom, I was bereft to find that my narrow canoe of a foot swam in the size 9, but I refused to wait yet another month for a downsizing exchange. (In olden times, shopping could be a breathtaking pain in the butt!)

My fix, of course, was just doubling up on scrunch socks. Luckily for me, my feet continued to grow in college and then again during pregnancy in my late 30s — they are currently a size 10, sometimes 11 — so my boots now fit with just a lightweight sock. (If you want yours to fit sans double socks right from the jump, L.L.Bean recommends sizing a full size down.)

As Wirecutter’s guide to the best rain boots points out, these shoes do three things well: comfortable walking, dealing with mud, and tolerating wet weather. And I very much agree. My feet and plantar fascia would never mistake these duck boots for New Balance shoes, but I can walk incidental, errand-running miles in them without a twinge. I especially love them in mud and rain: Whereas Hunter boots are cavernous and clumsy around my ankle and instep, the Bean Boots are snug and nimble.

Perhaps more impressive than their durability is their sustained relevance — Bean Boots have never gone out of style. Back when I was in college, everyone on campus wore them for both style and practicality: As it happens, the same rubber-meets-leather construction that makes the Bean Boots so great for duck hunting also hits the mark for scuffing through rain to get to class, scuffing across sticky kitchen linoleum at keg parties, and scuff-dancing in the mud at outdoor concerts.

We were never not scuffing. Sure, wearing the boots loose and unlaced was the fashion — but it was also the best way to take them on and off quickly and easily. These days, I put in the effort to lace them and tie them tightly around my ankle, and that V-stay loop at the back isn’t merely ornamental: I have to tug mightily to get the boot on my foot. Even so, thousands of wears later, the three rows of stitching that hold the leather upper to the rubber bottom are intact.

After nearly 40 years with them, I acknowledge that they aren’t pristine or perfect. The cute chain tread is worn away in several spots (though I have yet to send them in for a new bottom, which L.L.Bean will repair for $49), and the original 1987-issue insoles were garbage to begin with, so I’ve slid in off-the-rack replacements several times. The brown rubber has some bloom, and a few eyelets have gone green with oxidation (both are probably due to the boots’ being tossed down cellar in the off-season). Also, crucially, they are abysmal snow boots: Ensconced in unlined rubber and leather, my feet become blocks of ice.

Several of my Wirecutter colleagues have had similarly happy long-term relationships with their Bean Boots. About a dozen years ago, writer Joshua Lyon was an early adopter of duck boots with a waxed-canvas upper from the company’s Signature collection, and though his first pair came apart at the triple stitching within a year, the company replaced them for free, and they’re still holding up a decade later.

Notably, Bean Boots are a pick in our guide to the best rain boots, not winter boots. And it was the insulated variety that got demerits from colleagues. One found that the lining chafed her foot, and another disliked how they made her feet overheat — and made them a bit stinky. About eight years ago, I bought my husband a pair of the shorter boots, and they still look fantastic, though not quite as lived-and-loved-in as mine.

Granted, whether you get 38 years or 38 months or even 38 days out of a pair of shoes certainly depends on how hard you ride them. As much as that varies from person to person over the years and decades, one part of the Bean Boots remains constant: They have always been made in Maine.

Honestly, none of their flaws could make me love my boots any less. I’m proud that I’ve owned an iconic object for so very long. Before they became holiday ornaments, dog toys, and wicked delightful Bootmobiles, the Bean Boots were merely the things I spent some of my first adult money on.

Today, I wear them with pretty much everything — jeans or overalls or a midi skirt or any of the other usual looks of a 56-year-old Brooklyn mom. And when I’m feeling particularly nostalgic and defiant, I’ll revisit my 18-year-old self and pair them with shorts and a fleece in the middle of November, like the New England girl I will always be.

This article was edited by Hannah Rimm and Catherine Kast.