Secretive shoe Instagrammers

IN THE WORLD of Instagram fashion, there are very few categories more mysterious and secretive than the men's dress shoe category. Many fashion Instagrammers display their faces and bodies, and happily exploit the commercial opportunities that come with being recognisable. But most men's shoe Instagrammers tend to display their shoes alone - without their faces, and without trying to monetise their habit.

Most tend to be professional men in their 30 and 40s, with lucrative practices in law, finance, medicine and other fields. They post images of their shoes regularly, often to show what shoe and sock combination they've picked out for the day. And they are completely obsessed with the rare and exquisite craft of cordwaining, the traditional way of making shoes by hand, that has disappeared from mainstream shoe production.

Many adopt specific poses that separate them from the rest: There is @thatguysshoes who's taken the same top-down shot of his shoe-clad feet every workday for four years. There's @iamwkwk whose signature pose is a pair of hands tying the shoelace of one shoe. And then there's @deshellvedge who has a distinct one-foot-crossing-the-other-foot pose. Their followers can number in the five or six figures.