When we were asked to go walking by the people at British bootmakers John Lobb, our first reaction was: “what’s walking?” and second, on explanation that it’s really quite easy, and that all you really have to do is put one foot in front of the other was: “yes” – we found ourselves swiftly whisked off to the Cornish coastline to see the brand’s Spring Summer 2018 offering in situ.
More specifically, we were off to St Mawes, a small port-town just across the Carrick Roads estuary from Falmouth. It’s very pretty. Rugged, even. Poldark was filmed just down the road. A town so pretty, in fact, that one (here unnamed) member of the press, after indulging in a couple of glasses of vino, woke up the next morning, lights on, iPad still googling 12-bedroom properties in the area.
The reason for Cornwall was simple – the seaside county was once the home of one John Lobb, born there in the 1850s. Granted, it’s a bit of a while since then, but the spirit of the bootmaker lives on, the brand recently reinvigorated by the determined Brazilian-born designer, Paula Gerbase, installed as Artistic Director in 2014. A lady who now knows just about everything about shoes and leather there is to know (fun fact: did you know that cows get stretchmarks?).
Gerbase, who led the coastal walk, studied womenswear at Central Saint Martins before cutting her teeth at Savile Row’s Kilgour, as well as starting her own label, 1205. When she began at John Lobb she had a certain impression of it – “very Savile Row,” she tells me – posh shoes for posh blokes, basically. But, after doing a little – scrap that, a lot of – digging, she found a man who lived quite a different life.
For a start, John Lobb was not a man born into the elite society who are now most frequently found wearing his shoes. Rather, he was the son of a farmer, Lobb’s career in footwear beginning not out of a desire to hawk his wares, rather out of necessity – that necessity being the need for something to wear to undertake the massive walk between Cornwall and London. Namely: a pair of boots, which he crafted himself, by hand. Finding an affinity for the process he began making them for others on arrival in London, even moving briefly to Australia to cater for the country’s gold rush.
But there was something else that intrigued Gerbase about Lobb. As we begin the walk, she explains that he was, in her eyes, one of the first creators of sportswear as we now know it. The evidence? A pair of turn-of-the-century riding boots, designed to be worn as equestrianism flourished in the era of Queen Victoria. And that’s when it all came together – John Lobb, Paula realised, was a man who made shoes to work – to walk in, to move.
Paula is methodical. Her approach is purposely slow. She knows the clients, she knows the archives. She doesn’t think that modern designers mine their archive enough. Her discoveries become interwoven into her work – sometimes explicitly, other times through the subtlest of details. Take, for example, the yellow stitching that runs around the sole of her lightweight suede trainers for SS18 (“barefoot” she calls them – not only for their lightness but because you can, technically, wear sans socks) was taken from the colour of Lobb’s old branding. She admits the colour (designed at the time to act like the Hermès orange) was “a bit horrible” but she wanted to incorporate it somehow – it was part of the history. In this context, it looked good.
Paula wears the shoes herself – for the walk, alongside the cliffsides of Cornwall, she wears a leather hiking boot from the previous winter. She’s been trialling them, as she does all her shoes. Yes, she reasons, these ones work for the task in hand. Along the walk the SS18 collection was displayed on plinths designed by artist Robert Storey, dotted along the coastal path and echoing the rugged landscape, sat amongst wild ponies (really), a brief glimpse of a nudist beach down below or the teetering Logan’s Rock, which looks set to fall at any moment. But this landscape was not just a backdrop, but the very points that Paula found her initial inspiration – the turquoise blue of the ocean, the white of the breaking waves, the cool grey of the bulging cliffs.
Which sounds literal – it wasn’t, rather, it was refreshing to see fashion in the very location it was dreamt up. “How often do you get to do that?” she told me later that evening. In an endless trail of presentations, it stood out.
For SS18, she’s doing that thing of reinterpreting a classic, which always seems easy – but as the world consumes fashion differently, it’s a tough ask. “I mostly wear Nikes,” she admits on the walk. People do, she says – so when they wear a Lobb shoe, she wants to echo comfort. Crepe soles loosen up a lace-up suede shoe. One shoe was weighed per part for ultimate lightness.
It’s painstaking work. They only use the finest of leather. That with stretch marks or mosquito bites (cow’s skin, is, after all, subject to scars and imperfections like our own) are thrown away, inspected under 5 different lights before they are formed into shoes.
There’s womenswear too – the second time she’s designed them for the house. Initially, she was reticent. Lobb, for her, was about men. But then she found some sketches in Northamptonshire, where the shoes are painstakingly made. The soles looked narrower, the sizes smaller. She asked around, and got lots of “nos” until one factory worker said that yes, during the 90s. That was her “okay” moment. Here, they came in backless buckled boots, monk-strap inspired, or as perfect lace-up sandals in patent leather.
The walk itself culminated, as all good things should, with food. And wine. Who said working in fashion was hard? And worth the walk? You bet.
