How to merge a leg inside a shoe? (physically not connected)

Question

I edited a mesh looking like this:

I cut the shoes from the legs, edited the shoe a bit and inserted the leg into the shoe so it looks like this (much better):

There is a small gap between the leg and the "wall" of the shoe.Now the only problem is that I want the shoe and the leg to be connected to each other as one mesh, I want to bridge them somehow without losing that edge contrast, that's the whole point of this project. I tried merging verticies but that didn't solve it (edge got ruined). NOTE:Both shoes and legs count as one object (ctrl+J) so that's not the problem, I want them to be connected via mesh. Does anyone know?

Answer 1

No need to merge the vertices, connect them instead.
Then just move the edge into the shoe, so there's enough contrast.

Connect the two edge loops
(You can also do it manually one by one with Ctrl + F)

Then move the edge into the shoe, so the objects look separated.

You can use more loopcuts if you want it to look better.
And move it as deep into the shoe, as you need.

Answer 2

Well here is a conundrum. You want two objects that in the real world are separate to be connected as one. Think about modeling objects like they are in the real world, your shoe is not part of your leg.

I'd recommend you not try to connect the leg and shoe. There is no problem with them being the same object. The issue comes when you try to make everything have the same edge flow.
The leg should be one mesh and the shoe is one mesh (even if in the same object).

What you should do to bridge the gap is extrude the edge of the shoe inwards so that it is inside the leg. (edge is selected in left half of the image below)