Like most men I would rather wear quality leather shoes than any other. If you work on your feet all day, regardless of whether it is as a laborer or business professional you probably prefer wearing leather shoes to synthetic materials. Leather shoes and boots have been relied on for hundreds of years for their resilience and the way that they protect our feet.
Most leather shoes are made from cowhide but they can also come from other animals such as exotics like ostrich or snakeskin. Fine quality men’s leather shoes are made from only the highest quality leather. Italian shoemakers are famous for hand selecting the leather they will use for a shoe and then hand sewing the shoes as well. Another very popular form of leather for men’s shoes is suede.

In 1818 creative New Jersey inventor Seth Boyden (1788 – 1870) discovered a special finishing process during which several layers of dyes, oils, varnishes, or resins were applied to unfinished leather shoes, giving it a hard, glossy finish. Shoe factories near his home in Newark soon began producing fashionable leather shoes from the new leather shoes. By the end of the nineteenth century young boys and girls of wealthy families wore black patent leather shoes, and they were also a popular choice for adult formal wear. In the 1920s a popular men's hairstyle where the hair was slicked down flat with oil was known as the patent leather shoes.

By the year 302 B.C. in the Warring States Period (475—221 B.C.) , the craft of shoe-making was introduced to the central areas by King Wuling of the Zhao Kingdom and since then the dominant Han nationality began to wear leather boots. Until now,16 minorities including the Mongolians, Tibetan, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Xibe and Oroqen who live in the west, northeast and northwest still use animal skin as the main material in shoe-making.