What did the shoes say about the man? A classic black penny loafer guy (though if you look closely more often his had a patent sheen, or were a modified penny loafer wingtip hybrid), paired with classic white (or sparkly white) socks. Penny loafers were invented in 1936 by the Bass company who coined them, “Weejuns”, after the Norwegian farmers slip on style shoes they were modeled after. In the 1950’s the loafer come out of the suburbs and morphed into a symbol of classic cool, personified by James Dean, who also took plain, everyday items like a white t-shirt and workingman’s jeans and transformed them into a signature for a new generation. Like James Dean, Michael Jackson was transforming himself — from child star into bona fide pop phenomenon. Off the Wall to Thriller, teenager to man, child to sex symbol. As he made his mark as an adult, he chose penny loafers — etched in people’s minds as classic, icons of prep,and turned people’s ideas of what that meant on its head. Certainly he was troubled, isolated, sad, but when he was on stage he was forever transforming something — transforming an ordinary day into a force don’t stop, or burning the new MTV generation’s mind with the images of Thriller and Billie Jean. He used the penny loafer as a reference point, then took us all somewhere else in it as he moonwalked backward across the stage and into our collective consciousness.