How to Bar Lace Your Chucks

Chuck Taylor sneakers are the perfect shoes for displaying creative lacing styles with their simple canvas uppers. The straight-laced style known as bar lacing gives your shoes a clean, minimalist look that not only nixes the diagonal lines across the tongue of your shoe, but can even relieve pressure from the top of your feet. Once you get the hang of the technique, bar lacing your shoes only takes a few minutes, and all you need are your Chuck's original laces.

Thread your laces through the two bottom eyelets (toward the toes), working from the outside. This creates the first bar. Even out the ends of the laces so they are the same length.

Take one end of your laces, then feed it through the eyelet above it. Take that same end, bring it over the tongue and then thread it through the top of the eyelet that's directly across the one you just came up through. This creates bar number 2.

Grab the opposite end of the lace, then thread up and through the next available eyelet (in this case, the third eyelet) on the same side. Bring this end over, across the tongue and down through the eyelet on the opposite side, just as you did before.

Continue to run the ends of the laces up along the inside of the shoe, threading the laces through every other eyelet and bringing them over the tongue to create the bars. Finish by tying the laces in a bow or by tucking them into your shoes.