--- title: "The Penny Loafer Started in a Norwegian Village" url: https://quietmenace.com/style/penny-loafer-bass-weejuns-history/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Style published: 2026-10-20 updated: 2026-10-20 topics: Menswear History, Wardrobe Essentials, Heritage Brands --- # The Penny Loafer Started in a Norwegian Village > A fjord shoemaker, a Maine bootmaker with a pun for a product name, and a coin in the strap that nobody has ever fully explained. Nils Gregoriusson Tveranger was 13 when he left Aurland, on Norway's western fjords, for North America. He learned to make shoes there, and at 20 he went home. Around 1908 he introduced his first design in Aurland, and in 1910 it won him a diploma at the exhibition in Bergen. Around 1930 he made a laceless version with a strap stitched across the top of the foot and called it the Aurland moccasin. That is the shoe that, after a few detours through England and a factory in Maine, became the penny loafer. Tveranger lived until 1953, long enough to see American college students put coins in it. ## From the fjord to Esquire The usual telling has Tveranger noticing how close the Native American moccasins he saw abroad were to the simple slip-ons Norwegians already wore at home, then combining the two. Whatever the inspiration, Aurland became a shoe town. A 1953 catalog listed about ten shoe factories there, and the shoes that went to the United States were sold as Norwegian Moccasins. British anglers who fished in Norway between the wars brought pairs home, and London had its own version too. Raymond Lewis Wildsmith of Wildsmith Shoes made a slip-on house shoe for King George VI, often described as the first loafer. In the US, Esquire championed the style with photographs of Norwegian farmers in cattle-loafing sheds. Whether the word loafer came from those barns or from the idea of lounging around depends on who you ask. ## Bass and the Weejun George Henry Bass was born in Wilton, Maine, in 1843. In 1876 he joined a local shoe firm, E.P. Packard & Co., as junior partner, and by 1879 he owned it outright and had put his name on the door. G.H. Bass & Co. built its reputation on hard-wearing outdoor footwear, the Bass Moccasin Cruiser of 1906 and the Rangeley of 1910 among them, and the company made ski boots that Admiral Richard Byrd wore on his Antarctic expeditions. Bass died in 1925, and his sons John and Willard ran the business when it introduced the Weejun in 1936. The name is a play on Norwegian, shortened into something an American shopper could say. The Bass version added the detail that matters, a leather strip across the saddle with a diamond-shaped cutout in the middle. Nobody at the factory in Maine could have known what students would do with it. ## So why the penny? Nobody knows for certain, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling shoes. The behavior is documented. By the 1950s, students at East Coast prep schools and colleges were tucking a coin into the slit on each shoe, and by the middle of the decade penny loafer was the name for a whole studied-casual look. The most repeated explanation is that the penny was there for an emergency phone call. It falls apart quickly, since a pay phone call cost more than a penny and a single coin wouldn't have paid for one. The likelier answer is plainer. A bright copper coin looks good against brown or burgundy leather, and a small flourish on an otherwise sober shoe is exactly the kind of thing undergraduates do. Treat the phone booth story as campus folklore. ![A man wearing brown leather loafers](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1556004583-d2aaffbba592?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Brown leather, no laces, nothing to adjust. The fit has to be right the day you buy them. Photo by Alex Hudson on Unsplash* The loafer settled into the Ivy uniform next to chinos, crewneck sweaters and the [oxford cloth button-down](https://quietmenace.com/style/oxford-cloth-button-down-history/). Its popularity peaked in the mid to late 1960s, again from the early 1980s into the early 1990s, and once more on American campuses in the early 2000s. Around the early 1980s, socks became optional. ## Who kept it alive The most famous pair belonged to a performer, not a student. Michael Jackson wore penny loafers on stage, and most of his moonwalks and toe stands were done in them. That's quite a career for a shoe built for walking around a farm. Corporate life went its own way. The Gucci horsebit loafer, with its metal bar across the strap, became Wall Street's status shoe in the 1970s and 1980s, a much flashier relative of the plain Weejun. Bass itself changed hands several times. Chesebrough-Pond's bought the company in 1978 and sold it to Phillips-Van Heusen in 1987, and G-III Apparel Group acquired it in November 2013 for $50 million. In 2011 Tommy Hilfiger built a limited collection around the Weejun penny loafer. Wikipedia's [G.H. Bass entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.H._Bass) has the full company timeline, and its page on [slip-on shoes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip-on_shoe) covers the Norwegian side. ## How to wear them now Start with fit, because a loafer has no laces to bail you out. It should grip across the top of the foot when new, with a little heel lift as you walk that settles once the leather gives. If your heel pops out of the back on the first try, go down a half size. If the strap digs in, it won't ease enough to matter. The classic pairing still works. Burgundy or brown loafers, chinos with a short break or no break at all, an oxford shirt and a navy crewneck. For something less collegiate, go wider in the trouser. Pleated gray flannels, or loose fatigues hemmed so the whole shoe shows, make the loafer look current rather than costumed. With jeans, choose a dark, clean pair, and our guide to [raw selvedge denim](https://quietmenace.com/style/raw-denim-selvedge-guide/) covers how to break them in. Summer is easy. A heavy [white T-shirt](https://quietmenace.com/style/white-t-shirt-history/), shorts or cropped trousers, no visible socks. In cooler months a blue [French chore coat](https://quietmenace.com/style/chore-coat-french-work-jacket/) over a sweater gives the shoe a workwear partner that keeps it from looking too neat. White socks are the riskier move, and they work best with black loafers and trousers cut short enough to show them on purpose. Suede, as in the picture at the top of this page, softens the whole thing. It's the better choice if most of your wardrobe is denim and knitwear, and the worse one if you live somewhere wet. More on the history of the clothes we still wear is on our [menswear history hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/) and in the [Style section](https://quietmenace.com/style/). Jackson's moonwalk first reached a national TV audience in May 1983, on the Motown 25 special taped that March in Pasadena, thirty years after Tveranger died. A shoe drawn up for fjord farmers ended up gliding backward across a California stage. --- Filed under: [Menswear History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/), [Wardrobe Essentials](https://quietmenace.com/topics/wardrobe-essentials/), [Heritage Brands](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/) Hero image: Photo by David Lezcano on Unsplash (Unsplash License)