Man With 2,000 Pairs of Socks Has No Cold Feet

Darryl Parker owns more than 2,000 pairs of socks, which means he could wear a fresh pair every day for more than five years without troubling the same toes twice. Laundry day, should he ever attempt it all at once, would cease to be a household chore and become an infrastructure project.

Parker, a retired firefighter and paramedic from North Augusta, South Carolina, is now attempting to turn his substantial supply of foot coverings into a Guinness World Record.

The collection began innocently enough with a Father’s Day gift. After that first pair, socks began arriving for other occasions, including birthdays and anniversaries. What had started as a present gradually developed into a collection large enough to require both official counting and, one imagines, a very clear policy on drawers.

Eventually, Parker’s family noticed that the situation had advanced beyond the normal boundaries of sock ownership.

“My wife was like, ‘Yo, listen, you got so many socks here...’ my grandkids came and told me... ‘how about we try for the Guinness World Record?’” Parker told television station WRDW/WAGT. “I was like, ‘You know what? Let’s do it.’”

It is an admirably relaxed response to discovering that one’s family has begun viewing the contents of the wardrobe as a potential international achievement.

Parker has already cleared the number attached to the existing record. The current Guinness World Record holder is Jim Donovan, a retired CBS Philadelphia news anchor. Donovan’s collection was officially tallied in 2025 at 1,531 unique pairs.

As of Sept. 1, 2026, Parker said his own collection had surpassed 2,000 pairs. That puts him more than 469 pairs beyond Donovan’s recorded total, although Guinness records are not settled merely by having a large quantity of knitwear and saying so. The socks must still go through the organisation’s official verification process.

Parker is not submitting the collection just yet. He plans to keep collecting socks until the end of the year, allowing the total to grow further before sending the evidence to Guinness World Records for verification.

For now, Donovan remains the official champion, while Parker holds the less formal distinction of being a man with over 2,000 pairs of socks and apparently no intention of putting his feet up. The final number will not be known until his collecting period ends, after which Guinness will decide whether North Augusta has become home to the world’s largest officially recognised sock collection.