Does Rain Ruin Suede Boots? The Boot Counter and the Spray Counter Disagree

Two companies looked at the same weather this year and published opposite advice. Crockett & Jones, the Northampton shoemaker, ran a guest essay on its house blog titled “Don’t Be Afraid To Wear Suede In The Rain,” in which the writer walks £500 suede Chelsea boots through Storm Éowyn and reports them fine. Red Moose, an American shoe-care brand, put it this way on its own blog: suede “will get damaged from being worn in the rain” if it isn’t protected first. Crockett & Jones would like to sell you the boots. Red Moose sells the spray, plus a cleaning kit for afterward.

You’ll be asked to pick a side soon, because suede is the texture fall has decided on. When Who What Wear’s Anna LaPlaca tried on fall trends at the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale on July 20, she called suede boots “probably the strongest category in the entire sale” and picked a $495 Staud pair, marked down to $330. Same editor who crowned satin flats three weeks later, and the weather coverage repeats too. Across that try-on piece and the site’s August list of five fall trends, I counted zero uses of waterproof, protect, or weather. “Rain” technically appears twice. Once inside “Soft Grain Suede,” once inside “Fall on the Brain.”

Owners supply the weather themselves. Type “suede boots rain” into Google and autocomplete finishes the sentence with “does rain ruin suede boots,” “are suede boots waterproof,” and the bleak “what happens to suede in the rain,” a question you only ask while looking at the answer. My favorite variant is “can you wear faux suede in rain,” because it means people aren’t sure what their own boots are made of.

That last question is the real one.

What happens to suede in the rain?

Suede drinks, because suede is leather cut from the underside of the hide, usually a split, and Wikipedia’s textile entry lists the consequences without drama: open pores, quick to absorb liquids, less durable than full-grain. On paper, then, the fear checks out. Crockett & Jones doesn’t dispute the anatomy. Its argument is that modern tannage settles it, since fat liquors added during tanning make water bead on the surface, and its nastiest-weather suedes have names: Repello, Rough-Out, and a top-shelf Reverse Calf that is full-grain and unsplit, just worn nap-out. Notice what the reassurance is attached to. The tannage, not the word.

Can you wear faux suede in the rain?

Forever 21’s faux suede boots, $49.99, list an upper of 96% polyester and 4% spandex, and weather has no quarrel with polyester. I pulled three spec sheets, and that was the one that itemized everything, every insole layer named. Steve Madden’s Define bootie, €169.99 on its EU site, discloses exactly one word, “Suede.” The $495 Staud Western Wally that anchors the trend coverage has no material line at all on its product page. There, “suede” is the colorway. The word is most of what you get at the mall. Cheap discloses because the law makes it, heritage discloses because the tannage is the sales pitch, and the trend tier in between, the one the shopping lists actually link, tells you the least.

So rewrite the search. Ask which of the three products wearing that name you own, and the rain question mostly answers itself. If the label says polyester, relax, rain was never coming for plastic. Owners of the tannage-essay kind have it in writing from the maker: wear them through the storm, brush them after. The boots that need the spray ritual are the middle ones, the ones that won’t say what they are, and those are also the ones you can skip this fall, because the trend’s own coverage puts suede on flats, sneakers, bags, and jackets you already own in some form. The two salesmen do agree on one thing, by the way. Yes, you can wear suede in the rain, as soon as you’ve bought the thing they’re selling.

The field-tested review of the season is sitting in the search bar, typed one regret at a time.