My workmate rolls his up like fatty twat (size 3XL feet, basically), balls his socks into a fist sized chunk and chuck it in a drawer like some sort of drug dealer. My wife rolls hers into neat little cylinders, two(socks) wide and filed carefully like something you’d expect at the back of an Apothecary’s shelf. The both think the other has taken leave of their senses. The both of them have rolled their socks their way for around fifteen years and never once considered that there may be a better way because frankly when you find a system you like you look silly changing it.
I’ve worked behind a till long enough listening to guys moan about drawer full of socks they can’t match anymore to have picked a side in that battle and it isn’t really about neatness. It’s about the two things that actually matter when you fold a sock; What happens to the elastic over time, and how easy is it to actually find a matching pair when you’re half asleep at half six in the morning without turning your entire drawer into a crime scene.
What the fold does to the sock itself
The ball and chuck. Rolling one sock into a cylinder and stretching it around its pair to create a neat little parcel has been how most of us were shown to fold a sock growing up.
Mum shows you, she was shown by yours.
Looks tidy for about two weeks then your cotton cuffs start to lose the will to live. By stretched sock on the outside of that rolled pair is under tension every time it goes back in the drawer, and elastic isn’t good at being forced to stay stretched at maximum length all day every day, it wants to rest. Six months of that and you’ll notice your cuff is looser, your sock isn’t gripping your calf Anymore and is sliding down your ankle by lunchtime. Worst of all, that’s exactly how you end up spending £25 on another pair you “absolutely needed but can’t believe were so expensive” in my shop two weeks later because yes you, gigantic sock murdering monster, did shrink those yourselves.
Had a customer last month, large man, kept buying the same brand of heavyweight work sock every few months complaining they “didn’t last very long,” before I finally sat him down and made him show me how he folded them when they got home. Exact ball and chuck method I described above. “It’s not the sock, It’s what you do to the sock when you put it away every night.” Still hurts telling people, nothing will ever feel like more of an insult to someone than suggesting their grandma didn’t show them the best way to fold things but Socks care not for our Grandmas.
Flat folding your socks by laying one on top of its pair then folding the cuff over both does zero tension on the material. Nothing’s stretched, nothing’s trying to contract with equal force, they’re just sat there going “nah…” until your wife forces you to sort them out. It’s less satisfying to fold that way, I’m not gonna lie to you. There’s no proud looking at your finished sock burrito at the end of it. They are, objectively, less cool looking when folded. Flatter, honestly. But my exact same three pairs of merino socks have been through last winter and this spring with barely any sign of cuff droop, and the ones I kept balling up in my bottom drawer as a control experiment are already visibly looser than they were. Again, hardly double-blind scientific method here, but when has leaving one of your shelves as a control ever hurt anybody?
What the fold does to your actual sock drawer
Now here’s where I’ll chuck my hackles up, because balling your socks up like that does one thing better than folding flat and I’m not an idiot; Accessibility. A balled pair of socks is a self-contained unit. Dive into your drawer, fish out a chunk, it’s a matched pair. Flat folded socks stacked on top of eachother have a tendency to move around if your drawer isn’t particularly tight, or someone’s shoving their elbows in without care like it gets every morning in my drawer, and you end up with single socks sliding around independent to their pair which is chaos of a far less dramatic but equally frustrating kind.
The answer, the one I’ve settled on through years of picking both sides of that fight is; stand the pairs up on their side rather than folding them flat. Like filing files.
Solve’s all the sliding issues; you can see every pair you have in your drawer at a quick glance rather than rifling through stacks, without putting any tension on the cuffs like you still aren’t folding them tightly enough.
It feels minor. Trust me it’s made a surprisingly big difference to how quickly I can get out the door some mornings and half the customers I sell socks to live for that kind of life improvement.
Speaking of quantity, standing them on their edge also allows you to fit significantly more in your drawer too. You’re using the full depth of the drawer rather than just the height of your sock stack, which adds up more than most people realise when you’re trying to squeeze assorted work socks for someone with a Size 12 foot into the same shallow drawer their Allen Keys shared in their flat pack bedroom wardrobe. Resorted to filing away myself recently and took enough socks out of my drawer just to accommodate the new system I had completely run out of space. From socks sliding about and not wanting to shut properly to having extra room at the back I didn’t even know I had; Not the outcome I expected when I started looking at how I folded socks.
TLDR? Don’t ball your socks anymore and store them flat on their edge instead. Your socks will last longer and you’ll be able to fit more of them in your drawer if you do both. It’s not as immediately satisfying as creating a perfect little sock tablet when you’re folding up but by GOD will those socks still fit you properly in twelve months time when you decide to use them again, and isn’t that the point of owning socks?
