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Christmas is here again. This time it was even white here in the southern parts of Sweden, which isn’t common nowadays. After having the whole family ill the past week we’ve celebrated at home by ourselves, which still has been lovely. On my feet I’ve had these bespoke Carlino lazymans in vintage pigskin.
During the course of time various trends have come and gone also within the world of classic shoes. Often these are more special stuff which is seen as cool and beautiful during some time, but then reaction comes and the opposite opinion becomes the ruling opinion. Spade soles are a good example of this. Also briefly about a new online calendar gathering shoe and clothing trunk shows around the world.
To convince customers to choose to buy your shoes – out of a huge amount of options – one have to do all one possibly can. Not only to make the most lovely looking shoes one can achieve, one also have to display them the best possible way, be it on a website or in a physical store. Here’s a lovely example of the latter – a highly memorable display.
Certainly aesthetically pleasing, albeit maybe not the most feet accommodating shape, but the backs of the now sadly deceased Italian shoemaker Riccardo “Freccia” Bestetti certainly stood out. This photo is of a sample where the shape was even more exaggerated, but also on regular customer shoes the backs were very curvy.
In most stores selling classic men’s shoes nowadays, the formal options have been more and more replaced by more casual models, sneakers, light loafers and so on. That’s why it’s nice to visit some shoe stores in the London business districts where still various black oxfords and other more formal footwear are in clear majority on the shelves.
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The shoes above all have a really high stitch density on the sole seams, with from the left 18, 16 and 14 spi (stitches per inch). Already the lowest one is a high spi for bespoke shoes, but Eiji Murata of Main d’Or isn’t really an ordinary maker. Now, the 18 spi version doesn’t really go well on actual customer shoes, with today’s leathers it becomes too fragile, but 16 spi I have on my latest pair from him.
It’s a model that every bespoke shoemaker and dress shoe brand have to have in their line-up – the black plain cap toe oxford. That doesn’t mean they have to be made to the traditional standards just to be beautiful, you can make something your own way and still have it classic, wearable and timeless. This shoe by Clematis Ginza is a good example.
In my social media recently when I wrote about Goodyear welted shoes made without gemming – the canvas rib glued onto the insole which the welt is attached to – several people were surprised that there was such a thing. Albeit standard on factory-made Goodyear welted shoes is the use of gemming, there’s still a bunch who do it the old-school way where a holdfast is carved from the leather insole.
Sole stitching done well is something that looks lovely, even more so if contrasting, so of course two rows of nice contrasting sole stitching looks marvellous. No wonder this became a thing on the posh spade sole shoes during the first half of the 1900’s. As often is the case though, the reason this type of construction appeared was from the beginning solely practical.
When one talk about classic men’s shoes it always feel a bit weird to talk about “hyped” styles, given that in most cases the ones that are all the rave at the moment have been around for loads of decades. The latest such, the split toe derby, has been sold as hot cakes for quite a few years now, yet it still seam to just continue to increase in popularity.
