The socks are arranged on the table like thin cuts of tenderloin.

“These are over a year’s worth of effort,” says one sock guy.

There are eight pairs, each a different color, vivid and rich and juicy-looking.

“This is $10,000 in socks,” says another sock guy, holding up a bright-red sock with thin white stripes.

A third sock guy has donned a pair. Despite his satisfied smile, he has one final criticism. “These are knee socks,” he says, pulling one up past the upper reaches of his calf, then planting his foot on the table, “and if we sell these, people will go, ‘Those are for old people.”

The sock guys have old-people names: Joshua Steinman, Jay Gaul IV and Turner Swicegood.

They are actually 30, 30 and 26 years old, respectively — not quite old enough to be squeezed of vitality and adventure by a lifetime of civil servitude. Once upon a time, three young men in search of safe nonconformity might have started a band. Now three young men, especially three young men in Washington, might launch a start-up to make a statement about dress socks.

“You can see more lines, a lot more negative space,” says Jay, pointing at the stripes in this latest batch that have been narrowed to one-sixteenth of an inch. “So it’s more pleasing.”

Josh and Jay are lieutenants in the Navy and met in officer candidate school. Josh met Turner, a civilian staff officer at the Pentagon who focuses on Middle East policy, through mutual friends. Together, when they clock out of the Defense Department, they are Penance Hall, an infant company that’s investing against the stodginess and cheapness of the traditional, mass-market cotton dress sock, with its gold-toed foot soldiers, by creating a wool alternative that is high-end, vibrant, calf-high and made in the United States. Because the socks would be made in America, the company would employ American businesses and, therefore, American people, the partners say. So the project isn’t just vanity or boredom or a whimsical sideline, although it could be that, too.

“A very patriotic product,” Jay says. He picks up a pair that is somewhere between royal blue and dark blue. “You wouldn’t mistake it for a gray or a navy,” he says. “It’s elegant.”

Turner is pacing a couple of feet away in his bedroom, talking into his cellphone.

“Oh, come on, you don’t have masculine hands,” Turner says to a friend on the other end.

Penance Hall needs a woman to paint her nails red and tie a man’s dress shoe for one of its promotional photos.

“Well, why don’t you send me a picture of your hands and I’ll be the judge.”

There’s a dapper energy earlier this month here in Turner’s Washington apartment. In a matter of hours, they’ll take a middle-of-the-night train to New York to blow their last $2,500 to film a promotional video on Pier 59 for their Kickstarter campaign, through which they hope to raise enough money ($36,000) to finance a first order of three kinds of socks. The small batch they ordered just for video and promotional purposes cost them thousands.

For the video, “we’ll have 15 seconds each to talk about wool,” as Josh puts it.

Turner is as animated as Jay is reserved, and Josh is the centered strategist in between. Jay can monologue about Edward VIII as a fashion icon, while Turner’s tastes tend toward the modern and relaxed. Washington’s business fashion falls somewhere in between these sensibilities — between riverfront preppy and boardroom pinstripes, between military sharp and lobby-shop smart — but the choices are nearly always too typical, the sock guys believe, and too often dismissive of the details.