Emily Ratajkowski Doesn’t Want to See Your Bare Ankles

Has Emily Ratajkowski read GQ’s earth-shattering new list featuring 59 dos and don’ts for getting dressed right now? Tough to say given the general timing of her latest High Low with EmRata podcast episode (which aired yesterday, while our list dropped today)—but based on the discussion therein of her fashion turn-offs on a man, she’s clearly on the same wavelength.

“My recent ick is men’s ankles. Exposed ankles. I hate that,” Ratajkowski said on the pod. “A dainty ankle exposed on the hottest man will ruin my day.” Her aversion to sockless ankles, she continued, is a legitimate dealbreaker: “There was a guy I was seeing and he came over in short pants and like, a shoe that exposed his ankle, and I have not seen him since.” Speak on it, Emily! A stockingless ankle is a cause worth putting one’s (presumably stockinged) foot down about.

A hosiery-based faux pas may seem persnickety to some, but not in this neck of the woods. Per the aforementioned list, “All shoes look better with socks.” (And to be clear: We mean crew-length socks, not ankle socks, which, as GQ’s Jake Woolf once brutally put it, “are the sign of a man who overlooks the details—or who hasn’t evolved his sock wardrobe since the eighth grade.”) The only thing worse than a sockless ankle above a shoe? A sockless ankle above a shoe over a no-show sock. You don’t need EmRata to tell you this, but her opinion doesn’t hurt.

That said, there’s a disclosure to be made here: Men’s fashion publications, particularly ye olde Gentleman’s Quarterly, is partially to blame for the 21st-century proliferation of woefully sockless, if well-intentioned, men. As my colleague Sam Schube once pointed out, flip through a decade-old issue of GQ and you’ll find a 21-year-old Zac Efron baring his fleshy anklebones in a suit and brogues, jumping from the hood of one car to another as though he were gleefully recreating the music video for R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” To be sure, my predecessors hold some responsibility here—my opinions, by contrast, are actually always right and will forever stand the test of time—but it’s never too late to correct the course.